He just shook his head, mute, and for some reason he recalled a book he’d read as a boy. It had been billed as an epic of first contact, and told the story of humanity’s discovery of an alien race, and how the contact had brought humankind to another level of understanding...
It had awed him at the time, and later it had been one of Chrissie’s favourite novels.
First contact... If it weren’t for the nascent grief burning in his chest, he would have rejoiced.
He found his voice, “Perhaps Lisa’s right. Perhaps we should try to establish some form of communication. We might learn from them. I don’t know... perhaps they’re technologically advanced. They might be able to help us repair...” He gestured around him at the wreckage, hopelessly.
Olembe snorted. “Look, we can talk about this all you want when we get back inside. Come on.”
Hendry moved towards the nose-cone.
“Stop!” Xiang yelled. She was looking across the ice, pointing.
Hendry wheeled, made out a movement perhaps twenty metres away. Something emerged from behind the microwave relay, paused and regarded the three humans.
He made out a vague, silvery form, starlight coruscating in bursts from the angles of its attenuated limbs.
For perhaps ten seconds—though it seemed an eternity to Hendry—human and alien stared at each other across what was at once merely a matter of metres, and also a chasm of wonder and ignorance.
Without warning, Lisa Xiang stepped forward. She moved towards the alien, step by slow step, and raised her right hand in greeting.
Olembe said, “For Chrissake, Xiang! Get back here!”
“It’s okay, Olembe. I know what I’m doing...”
Olembe snatched something from amid the wreckage beside him—a length of metal, which he held like a club.
Xiang paused, midway between Olembe and the alien, then adjusted the radio controls on the epaulette of her atmosphere suit. Her voice, when it issued from her helmet, carried across the ice to the extraterrestrial. “We come in peace,” Xiang said. “We are from Earth, and we come in peace.”
She would go down in history as the first human being to establish verbal contact with a member of an alien species.
And it was the very last thing she would do.
The alien moved.
Later, Hendry would have plenty of time to look back on what happened then as if it were a nightmare. An overwhelming terror eclipsed his grief, and the moment seemed to go on forever. He and his colleagues were transfixed, rendered powerless.
The alien advanced with lightning speed and was upon Xiang before she had a chance to flee.
It was over in an instant. There was no time to register surprise or fear as the thing approached. One second Lisa Xiang was standing, knees flexed as if frozen in the act of flight, arms still outstretched, and then she disintegrated.
Hendry saw sections of body explode in every direction. Almost instantly she was no longer where she had been. In her place, stilled now and facing them, was her killer.
Hendry had the fleeting impression of something insect-like, bristling with a dozen scintillating blades, a glimpse that lasted a fraction of a second before Olembe acted.
The African leapt forward and swung his improvised club, and the metal made ringing contact with Xiang’s killer. The creature moved, its retreat as swift as its attack. Hendry blinked and it was gone. Then he saw it again, fifty metres away, blades snickering the night air.
Olembe grabbed him. “You saw how fast it moved! Let’s get out of here!”
Hendry was ten metres from the crumpled opening of the lateral corridor, though it seemed a mile away.
Olembe sprinted. Hendry scrambled over the ice after him, falling and crying out in panic. He climbed to his feet and took off frantically. It seemed an age before he reached the mouth of the crumpled corridor and passed into its shadow. He chanced a backward glance, heart thudding, fearing what he might see. The thing was still out there, watching them. It could attack at any second, cover the distance between them in an instant.
He sprinted along the uneven surface of the corridor, Olembe ahead of him. They came to a bend and Hendry almost wept with relief as he made out an open hatchway. Olembe dived through, grabbing Hendry and pulling him inside. He slammed the hatch shut and both men collapsed against the wall, breathing hard.
Olembe swore.
“What?”
“The fool! The fucking stupid, idealistic fool!” Hendry looked at the African, and realised that he was weeping. “I told her, Hendry, I fucking told her! I should have stopped her!”
“You weren’t to know, Friday. Christ, I said maybe we should communicate with the thing,”
“First contact,” Olembe said. “What a fucking disaster! First contact. It’s been written about for centuries, the glorious day when we’d meet sentient aliens—”
Hendry said, “That thing was sentient?”
The African stared at him. “You didn’t see those choppers?”
Hendry shook his head. “I honestly don’t know what I saw.”
“It was armed to the gills, man. It wore armour. The mother meant big business. Sentient aliens, with manufacturing capability, and they welcome us like that.” He slapped Hendry’s shoulder. “C’mon.”
All Hendry could think about, as they made their slow way back along the tortured passageways, was how they were going to break the news to Kaluchek and Carrelli. A thousand colonists dead, and Lisa with them—and they were imprisoned within a dysfunctional starship surrounded by a race of homicidal extraterrestrials on a planet that made Antarctica seem hospitable.
They reached the elevator, pad and rose to the lounge.
Carrelli was sitting up, talking to Kaluchek. The women had found a stash of brandy and were holding squeeze tubes to their lips. As the pad lifted him into the chamber, Hendry pulled down the hood of his atmosphere suit and breathed the warm air.
Kaluchek indicated Carrelli. “Look who’s back in the land of the living.”
Carrelli smiled. “I’m fine. It was nothing. I’ll be okay.”
Hendry stepped off the pad, followed by Olembe. Silence filled the room like ice.
Kaluchek stared across at them. “What?” she asked, sensing something.
Carrelli stood and asked urgently, “Lisa? Where’s Lisa?”
Hendry shook his head.
Olembe eased past him, walked down the sloping chamber and grabbed a tube of alcohol from the storage unit. He took a slug, ignoring the medic.
“Joe,” Kaluchek said, “where the hell is Lisa?”
Hendry shook his head, words refusing to form.
Olembe snapped, “She’s dead.”
Hendry had never seen a face pantomime such incredulity as Kaluchek’s did then. “Dead? How—?”
“Her breathing apparatus failed?” Carrelli said. “The atmosphereis deadly?”
Hendry just shook his head.
“Listen up,” Olembe said. “We’re not alone on this fucking ball of ice. We were attacked. Lisa was attacked.”
Kaluchek raised fingers to her lips. Carrelli said, “What happened?” in barely a whisper.
Hendry had second thoughts about the brandy. He took a tube and drank. The liquid burned a path down his gullet. He fell into a sunken bunker and said, “Something... it looked like some kind of insect, armed with... I don’t know, swords of some kind. It came at us faster than—”
Olembe interrupted. “Lisa approached the thing. She actually moved towards it and said...” He stopped.
Hendry finished, in a whisper, “She said that we were from Earth, and we came in peace.”
“And then the fucker,” Olembe said, “tore her to pieces.”
Hendry looked from Carrelli to Kaluchek. Their faces were masks of shock, blood-drained and open-mouthed. “If it wasn’t for Friday we’d both be dead.”
The African shook his head. “I acted on instinct. Grabbed a piece of wreckage and hit the bastard. It gave us time
to get back inside.”
Dazed, as if she hadn’t fully taken in what the men had told her, Kaluchek said, “It killed Lisa? Where is she? Maybe Gina could—”
“Sissy,” Olembe said with pained precision, “imagine a samurai on speed, armed with a dozen scimitars. Lisa didn’t stand a chance.” Olembe paused, then said, “That isn’t all.”
Hendry’s throat was sore with the effort of clamping back a sob.
Carrelli said, “What? What is it, Joe?”
He shook his head, words impossible.
With a gentleness Hendry found surprising, Olembe said, “The colonists in Hangar Three... Joe found them. Chrissie was in Three.”
“They’re all...?” Carrelli said.
“The remaining three thousand are okay,” Olembe said.
Carrelli moved quickly to his side. “Joe, I can give you something. A sedative, something to take the pain away for a while...”
Hendry stared at his brandy and shook his head.
She glanced around at the others. “If you need to be alone, Joe...”
“No.” It came out faster than he’d intended, but he meant it. Right now, the last thing he wanted was to be left in the chamber by himself, prey to visions of the past.
He took another long drink, felt himself drifting. The conversation went on around him. He heard the words as if at a great distance.
At one point, Sissy Kaluchek said, “So... what now? What do we do?”
Olembe snorted, “There’s precious fucking little we can do, sweetheart. The planet out there isn’t exactly paradise, and the natives are hostile.”
Kaluchek stared at him. “You don’t think those things can get in here?”
Olembe looked across at Hendry. “Fuck knows. We’d better arm ourselves.”
“And then what?” Kaluchek said.
“Well,” Olembe grunted, “we can’t get the ship up and running and fly out of here. We gotta face the fact, we’re stranded, and there won’t be no more starships coming thisaway, at least not human starships.”
Carrelli said, “So we give in. Sit here and drink ourselves into oblivion. Is that what you’re saying?”
The African turned and stared at her. “You got a better idea?”
Hendry found himself saying, “We could always go back into cold-sleep, set to wake in a thousand years...” The prospect was appealing.
Olembe laughed. “And what good would that do, Joe? We’d wake up, and what would have changed?”
Hendry shook his head and took another mouthful of brandy.
“We haven’t explored the place,” Carrelli said. “We have arms, technology. If this place has daylight...” she shrugged. “You never know, we might make a go of it yet.”
“Strike up a pact with the friendly aboriginals,” Olembe sneered. “Come on, Gina.”
Carrelli faced down his stare. “I find your attitude very unhelpful,” she said, her Italian accent suddenly very hard. “We’re facing a bad situation, okay, and all you can do is give in.”
“Hey, sweetheart, I ain’t giving in.”
“It sounds like it to me, Olembe,” Kaluchek said.
Olembe shrugged. “Look, all this hot airing isn’t gonna solve a thing. Right now it doesn’t look too good. I’m a realist.”
“So you’re giving in,” Kaluchek pressed. “You can’t see a way out of this trap, right?”
Olembe stood and took a tube of brandy from the wall unit. “As of now, I can’t see a way out.” He moved up the incline to the far end of the lounge and slumped into a workstation, frowning at the screen.
Kaluchek watched him go, shaking her head. “Jerk,” she said under her breath.
Hendry said, “Go easy on him, Sissy.”
“Why the hell should I?”
Hendry shrugged. “He says what he thinks. He doesn’t hold anything back.” He looked from Kaluchek to Carrelli. “Admit it, he said what we were all thinking, but we didn’t want to come out with it.”
Kaluchek shook her head, staring into her brandy. “I don’t give in. No matter what. No matter how bad things seems. There’s always a way out, an answer.”
Carrelli backed her up. “We’ll survive. I know we will. All we need is knowledge. We can do anything if we have a full understanding of the situation we’re in.”
“I hope you’re right.”
The medic stood and moved to a vacant workstation. “I’ll try to find out what we have left in the way of medical supplies.”
Kaluchek watched her, then looked across at Hendry. “You should really have taken something from Gina, you know. Alcohol isn’t the answer.”
He ignored her. They drank in silence and stared out through the viewscreens at the dark night, the occasional star twinkling through the frigid atmosphere.
Hendry saw Chrissie lying in the catafalque, beautiful in death. Then the image was overlaid by the vision of Lisa Xiang, stepping forward, hand raised in peaceful greeting. He could not banish from his mind’s eye her bloody and futile death.
His thoughts drifted, back to Earth, to Chrissie.
He said, at last, “It’s strange...” and stopped there.
“What?”
He shrugged. “I was reasonably content, back on Earth. I lived alone.” He told her about the Mars shuttle and the starship graveyard. “I talked to Chrissie every month or so, saw her every couple of years.” He smiled. “It was enough to know that she was there, that sooner or later I’d see her again. Then she came, and told me about the mission. She was going to the stars, leaving me for good. The painful thing wasn’t so much being on my own, or even the knowledge that I’d never see her again— though that was bad enough—but not knowing what would happen to her. She’d live out her life among the stars, thousands of years after I was dead... and I wouldn’t know a thing about it.” He smiled. “Maybe I was a typical father. I wanted some control over her life.”
Sissy smiled and shrugged.
“And now she’s dead. It seems so damned pointless, so random. Why her? You know something, I was so looking forward to when she woke up and found me here.”
“I’m sorry, Joe.”
He stared at his brandy. “She was so fired up about the mission. She believed in this project. She wanted to build a world out here that worked, that didn’t repeat the mistakes we made on Earth.”
Sissy said, “We’ll do it, Joe. Somehow, we’ll—”
He said, bitterly, “Perhaps it’s just as well she didn’t survive. I mean, what are our chances—?”
“That’s grief talking, Joe. We’ll pull through.”
A while later he said, “Did you leave anyone on Earth?”
She shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “Not really. I split up with a guy a year before I was selected for the mission.”
“Parents?”
“Mom left when I was ten, ran off with some guy. Dad died a few years later. I had a sister I never saw. My kid brother... we did get along. He was killed in the cholera epidemic that swept through Canada a few years ago.” She laughed, unexpectedly.
“What?”
“Listen to me. A ‘few years ago’! All that happenedhundreds of years ago!” She stopped, then said, “Wonder what happened to Earth? Do you think anyone survived?”
He thought about Old Smith, the people he’d lived with on the commune, Bruckner and all the other admin staff at the ESO... long dead and forgotten. Well, almost forgotten.
“If humanity did survive... a thousand years is a long time... who knows what might have happened. Maybe some groups did struggle through, build a better place.”
She looked at him. “But you doubt it, right?”
He grunted. “Yes, I doubt it. We’d wrecked the planet. Left a nice mess for the generations who followed, if any did.”
He looked across at her, her brown eyes reminding him so much of Chrissie. “Who do you blame, Joe?”
“Blame? You mean the politicians of the twentieth, early twenty-first century? The industrialists?” He
shook his head. “They were just human, and greedy. They’d inherited systems and infrastructures it was almost impossible to change and break out of. I don’t blame anyone.”
“Human and greedy? We’re human and greedy, Joe. Does that mean there’s no hope?”
“I had the same conversation with Chrissie. Do we carry with us the seeds of our own destruction? She had faith in the ultimate success of the project. We were starting from scratch, we’d learn from our mistakes.”
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