She finally turned from the window and gave him a nervous smile, exhaling unsteadily.
“Don’t get excited,” he said in a calm tone.
“It’s my first time in space.”
Before she could break down into tears, he wrapped his arms around her.
“I don’t know if I want to do this,” she said with a quaver, but managed to turn the quaver into a laugh rather than a sob.
He was on the verge of replying it was too late to do anything about that, but at the last moment tact won a small battle in his brain and he realized she was just expressing understandable anxiety. She did not need a logical and obvious response.
The trip had, for Alistair, little in common with the one that took him from Srillium to Aldra. There was more room to move about and exercise now, more people with whom to speak, food stored and preserved with modern methods, entertainment in the form of threedies and access to the Comlat, though updates took longer and longer to reach them. Though he had dreaded another trip into space so soon after a two cycle sojourn, he soon discovered he was comfortable on the ship. In those moments when he forgot the tragedy of Kaldis, which so overwhelmed him that he scarcely considered the danger ahead, the time aboard The Spirit of the Revolution was not unpleasant.
Louise Downing avoided Alistair, her initial shock at seeing him being the extent of the notice and emotion she was willing to expend on him. Alistair, neither eager nor loathe to talk with her, followed her lead and made himself easy to avoid. It was not until, in a crowded cafeteria, he took one of the few open seats, next to his sister who happened to be sitting with Louise, that they were forced to exchange words. Katherine left them a few moments later with the excuse that she had work to attend to.
With Katherine gone, Louise sat erect and rigid in her seat, with a frosty air, saying nothing. Alistair, equally taciturn, was more relaxed, a fact that increasingly bothered Louise whose frequent and furtive glances in his direction confirmed for her his indifference. Finally, growing supremely uncomfortable, she was moved to speak.
“A fat lot of good your revolution did us.”
Alistair moved only his eyes, just for a moment, to glance at her. Then he shoveled in another bite of food. “What revolution was that?”
The apparent inanity of the question frustrated her, and she snapped, “The one that put your buddy in charge of the planet!”
Alistair shoveled in another bite and shook his head. “That wasn’t my revolution.”
“You were fighting in it.”
“Weren’t you working for the Bureau of Transportation?”
“Obviously.”
“Fat lot of good your government did us.”
His counterargument caught her off guard, and she fell silent and picked at her food.
“It was just two sides fighting to be in control. After the way they both behaved, there’s no sense blaming one more than the other.”
“I lost my brother, my uncle and two cousins.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, but under the weight of her accusatory tone, he couldn’t make it sound sympathetic. His response made her grit her teeth, and after a second of deliberation she stood up, the motion sending her chair flying back.
“I used to think I liked you,” she hissed and left him dumbfounded.
They reached the inevitable point where the hyperspace portion ended and deceleration substituted for gravity instead of acceleration. Later, there was a moment of weightlessness when the ship finally stopped its deceleration. Alistair was in his quarters when he felt himself come loose of his mattress, and then, when the artificial gravity was turned on, he sank back down on it. He set down the book he was reading and set out for the bridge.
As head of their respective teams, Alistair and Katherine were the only non crew members to have access to the bridge on their own authority. There were two separate automatic doors by which one could enter the bridge, and they each came through one at almost the same time. The Captain was standing behind two pilots, while the communications officer and the navigator were seated at their respective stations. The wall across from the entrances was almost entirely taken up by a window out of which only stars could be seen. Behind the Captain was a command table projecting a 3D image of the surrounding area. There was a small image of their ship always in the center of the display and, towards the edge but crawling towards them, another tiny dot.
“Take a seat,” said the Captain with a serious and professional voice, nodding towards a couple seats against the back wall of the bridge. His accent was from the sparsely populated eastern coast.
Alistair and Katherine sat down and strapped themselves in, and the Captain sat in his command chair. He pressed a button and spoke in a clear voice.
“This is the Captain, we are going to execute a rotational maneuver. Please get yourselves strapped in.”
A moment later, the navigator said, “Eighty thousand kilometers and closing.”
At this the Captain nodded, and he turned in his seat to look at Alistair and Katherine. “We’ll be there in a little over an hour.” Alistair and his sister shared a nervous glance and nod.
After pausing to allow passengers time to secure themselves, the Captain said, “Execute.”
Upon his order, the ship rotated and they swayed in their seats while the pilots and Captain relayed messages back and forth until the maneuver was complete.
Once again, the Captain pressed the intercom button. “The maneuver has been successfully completed. Passengers may now walk freely.” With that, he unstrapped himself and was out of his seat.
He came around to stand at the command table, and Katherine and Alistair joined him a second later. No sooner did they arrive than the lights of the bridge, programmed to imitate an Aldran day, dimmed to a twilight level. The colored glows of the displays and buttons stood out more.
“Raise the lights on the bridge only,” ordered the Captain.
A moment later the lights were back to daylight strength. The Captain grabbed a small object resembling a pen and poked its tip into the 3D display, pressing a small button on the side of the pen as he did. A red light blinked at the pen’s tip and the display changed, magnifying the area where the pen tip had been, the area around the object they were after.
“It’s big,” he said and he scratched at his close cropped beard.
“It’s larger than any ship in the Aldran fleet,” said Alistair as he studied the display’s readouts.
The vessel on the display was a flat-bottom craft in the shape of a square, a platform with the compartments of a ship affixed to it. Its most salient feature was the round, almost semi-circular building – if indeed it was a building – wrapping around most of the edge of the platform like two pincers of an ant, leaving a gap at one corner where the pincers did not quite touch and an open central area.
“Is this in true color?” asked Alistair as he inspected the black vessel.
“Yes,” the Captain replied, and he stuck the pen into the display once again and enlarged the ship so it almost entirely filled the view.
They saw that the pincers-like building had an irregular, almost lumpy exterior. In the flat area in the center there was a space where a ship might land, but the rest of it was filled with what seemed to be round obsidian pillars.
“That’s not human built,” said the Captain with a deeply skeptical voice, almost disapproving.
“It came from too far away to be human,” breathed Katherine with the sort of religious awe a pilgrim might have in Mecca.
“Seventy thousand kilometers,” announced the navigator.
“Should we hail it, Captain?” asked the communications officer.
The Captain, leaning with both palms on the edge of the command table, glanced up at the scientist and the marine.
“How do you hail an alien ship?” asked Alistair, giving voice to all their thoughts.
“The protocol established before take off was to hail it when we were within dist
ance. Now… I don’t know.”
He was a man of some fifty cycles, every one showing in the color of his beard, the wrinkles around his eyes and the calluses on his knuckles. It was evident indecision was something he was neither used to nor comfortable with, but he had little prepared for an encounter of this magnitude.
“We’re not going to sneak up on them,” Alistair softly said after a prolonged period of silence.
A moment more only did the Captain hesitate. “Hail them.”
After a couple minutes, the communications officer gave them an update. “No response,” he said. “Dead silence. I’m running through all the hailing protocols.”
“Sir,” said the navigator, “I’m not getting any sign of activity. No electronics, no movement, no energy fields… The only sign this is more than a lump of metal in space is the interior temperature: it’s just above the freezing point of water at normal pressure.”
“What the hell are those pillars?” wondered Alistair out loud, his gaze fixed on the image of his inquiry.
Shrugging, the Captain said, “Missile silos?”
The ex marine was dubious. “That’s an odd design. Why silos?”
“Sixty thousand kilometers,” said the navigator.
“Commence breaking,” ordered the Captain, and from the gentle tug on their bodies they knew the ship was decelerating again.
“Still no response to our hail.”
“And no sign of life.”
“Well,” said the Captain, “something built the goddamn thing.”
Katherine returned to her seat, looking pensive and nervous yet determined. The navigator soon announced their distance from the ship was fifty thousand kilometers. Alistair had not moved from the 3D display and rarely taken his eyes off it. The Captain went from station to station, overseeing the process of bringing the ship to a stop at a precise location. At the point when the planet of Aldra would barely fit between them and their destination, Katherine rose.
“I am going to prepare my science team. We’ll be there soon.”
Alistair absentmindedly nodded while the Captain did not appear to hear her. A moment later she was gone. The miles flew by more slowly and more time passed between the navigator’s announcements, an effect accentuated by their anxiety. Alistair felt they must have been crawling through space.
The navigator finally called a distance of twenty thousand kilometers and Alistair felt a chill sweat break out on his forehead. A debilitating fatigue seized his legs at fifteen thousand kilometers, and with a thrill of equal parts fear and excitement cramping his innards, the ex marine returned to his seat and sank into it. At ten thousand kilometers he was gripping the seat’s edge, and his breaths passed through clenched teeth. For all his physical prowess, he was helpless there on the bridge, subject to a thing that may have destroyed a star. No superb action nor clever plan on his part would save him. His life hung from a whim.
The others on the bridge, with not a day’s worth of combat experience among them, were worse off than he. Jittery fingers pressed buttons basted with sweat. Voices cracked and quavered; knees shook. Then, shortly after the navigator managed to force his vocal chords to deliver the news of a distance of one hundred kilometers, the Captain ordered an increase in the rate of deceleration. Alistair pitched forward in his seat, held in place by the straps and staring at the floor. This rapid deceleration lasted for some seconds. When it ended and the ship came to a complete stop, he sat back, let out a long exhalation… and saw the alien vessel through the bridge window.
At first it was barely discernible, its presence hinted at by a black patch of space where no stars were seen. The attenuated light of the remote suns and of The Spirit of the Revolution only barely served to bring some details into focus, right on the edge of resolution. The Captain ordered the spotlights turned on, and those tremendous illuminators clearly revealed the spaceship to the naked eye.
All tasks were dropped and all duties forgotten. Seated men rose from their chairs; standing men sat down. Somehow, some sort of change of position, slowly and reverently carried out, seemed a necessary acknowledgement. Centuries ago the first proof of an alien intelligence was uncovered on Kaldis. In the intervening time no second such find was ever uncovered. They were only the second group of Homo sapiens to discover a hint that in all the limitless vastness of the universe, in all the hundreds of billions of known galaxies and their sextillions of stars, Man might not be alone.
Silence reigned on the bridge and everywhere else, and out of every porthole and window wondering and frightened faces stared. They could no more have marred the moment with speech than they could have belched in the face of God. The obsidian hulk imitated their silence, or perhaps they imitated it. It was still, and they dared not move. It patiently waited, and they postponed action. They could only contemplate the wonder of it across the half kilometer of space between them.
And then its lights turned on.
Chapter 91
Without acceleration there was no sense of movement; an object in motion felt the same as an object at rest. After Alistair and his marines left the docking bay and gave their transport vessel a short burst of speed, they could not, merely through their own senses, claim to know it was they who were moving and not the alien spaceship coming to devour them. They lined the walls of the squarish pod – with Alistair and the corporal in the pilot seats – dressed in their spacesuits, their helmets set on the floor or perhaps resting on knees. Instead of the nervous shakes and jitters of those unfamiliar with danger and fear, they displayed the grim squints and folded arms of veterans.
“Still no response to our hail,” said the corporal as he studied his instruments and listened to the chatter on the bridge of The Spirit.
After lighting up, the alien vessel showed no further signs of life. It was not a dazzling display, just a handful of well spaced lights shining not out into space or onto the human’s ship, but rather illuminating the alien vessel itself. It was enough to make out the ship, but not enough to make it shine.
Alistair watched as the vessel grew until it expanded past the boundaries of the transport’s windshield. “Take a pass underneath it,” he said.
The corporal guided their transport pod downwards, and they went underneath the black alien ship, eyeing its featureless bottom.
“No obvious cargo doors or anything,” Alistair heard the Captain say over the intercom.
“And still no response,” repeated the corporal.
After the ship’s bottom slid by, the corporal turned their pod around to skim the top. They were now presented with a more interesting terrain to view. The semicircular part that was the bulk of the ship was confirmed to be smooth but irregular, lumpy. The other three corners of the square platform peeked out from beneath it. The flat portion in the middle, dotted with pillars, was also uneven, showing smooth dips and humps much like wet sand on a beach. The pillars themselves displayed the same irregularity, better resembling, upon closer inspection, the crooked digits of some ghoulish hand. The lights of the alien vessel slowly rotated now, causing the pillars’ shadows to sweep the deck at the same pace.
Katherine’s breathless voice burst out over the intercom. “Alistair, take your pod back a few yards, back to where you were.”
Alistair and the corporal exchanged concerned glances, but Alistair nodded to indicate the corporal should follow her suggestion. When their pod was brought to a halt, the lights stopped rotating. When they retraced their path, the lights rotated again, but in the opposite direction.
“The lights are following us,” said the corporal.
“The lights are shining on the ship, not you,” said the Captain. “Why should they follow you?”
“I’m just telling you what I’m seeing.”
“Go slowly now,” said Katherine, and as they reduced their speed, the lights rotated more slowly. “Be ready to stop on my mark.”
The shadows crept along, mimicking the pace of their transport pod.
&nbs
p; “Stop!” Katherine cried, exultant.
The corporal obeyed and they hung motionless over the vessel. Below, the lights, and consequently the shadows, stopped moving. The warped pillars necessarily cast warped shadows. The uneven ground necessarily twisted shadows cast on it. However, right at the point where they now found themselves, the twisting effect of the ground cancelled out the warping effect of the pillars and the shadows were straight as arrows. Exclamations came from several speakers at once.
“But what’s it mean?” demanded the Captain.
“Alistair, take your ship another inch or two forward,” said Katherine. “I think you’re not quite at the sweet spot yet.”
The requested maneuver once performed, the pod again floated motionless above the alien vessel. Suddenly, the open space among the pillars, a sort of clearing in the midst of a forest, glowed orange and before anyone could react beyond a gasp of surprise, a ray shot out and hit the transport pod.
“Alistair!” Katherine called out, and the Captain emitted an incoherent cry.
The ray did no damage but drew them towards the clear area of the platform, where they touched down with the gentlest of bumps and sat still and silent. The orange glow faded, but as it diminished they felt a growing gravity until they felt as if they were back on Aldra. Out the windshield, the pillars seemed like fingers trying to clutch the pod. A few of the lights, quite bright at that distance, shone right into their pod and Alistair squinted against the glare.
“Alright, suit up,” he commanded.
The marines needed little prompting. Helmets were donned and weapons checked. When Alistair placed the helmet over his own head, his ears instantly noted the change of environment. The ambient sounds of the pod were exchanged for a hollow sounding hum, almost like when one put one’s ear against a sea shell. The rustling of the troops’ preparations was muffled almost to silence, but as they too donned their helmets, he could hear their breath in their microphones.
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