by Jean Johnson
“I thought that was just a tribal tattoo,” Ayinda called back over the intercom from the cockpit, where she had vanished, pulling herself in Robert’s wake.
With Lars out of her way, she was free to move toward the cockpit finally. Her p-suit was an awkward choice of outfit but no worse than the current sleepwear of half the crew. “It is, but I’m also half-Polynesian, so there’s no such thing as ‘just’ a tribal tattoo.”
“You can talk about your skin-based fashion choices later,” Brad asserted. “It looks like we’re being pulled into a hangar bay of some sort.”
“Ay, ay, ay!” Maria muttered over her headset. “Look at the size of that thing . . . That has to be at least forty decks deep, if it can swallow us like a shark eating a guppy!”
“There’s no way with a configuration like that, that it can go through a hyperspace rift,” Robert agreed. He glanced back as Jackie opened the cockpit door and passed through, letting it close behind her. Palming off his headset, he spoke normally. Or as normally as a wobble of fear and worry in a man’s voice could sound. “So, Major . . . we’re about to make First Contact. This means I have to officially hand over this mission to you. So . . . what do we do now, sir?”
“Well . . . don’t damage the nose cone,” Jackie asserted, pulling herself into her seat and strapping in . . . after battling with her loose-floating helmet to wedge it in next to her along the port bulkhead. “Brad’s right about that part. But . . . I need to fire up the hyperrelay hub before we’re drawn in. At the rate we’re being moved, I should be able to make at least one report before we get into an atmosphere-laden environment . . . using the relay would be very bad after that point . . .”
“What do we do about the grapples?” Lars asked the others. He rubbed the sleep sand from his eyes as he did so and batted the stuff away in annoyance. The normally affable, laid-back Finn frowned unhappily at the approaching maw on the side of the ship. “They are the things drawing us in.”
“We can’t do anything just yet,” Brad said, shaking his head. “Even if she’s already suited, Jackie can’t get out there and get them unhooked on her own. They’re too big and too secure. I can’t get a good viewing angle on the jaws, but it looks like they’re giant springs. We can only hope the hook will let go of the nose cone at some point without damaging it.”
“Either that, or someone will have to go out there with Jackie to help remove it,” Robert agreed. Both men paused, then looked back over their shoulders at Jackie, who had fired up the hyperrelays and was awaiting pingback. She looked up at them, looked at the hangar bay they were being pulled into, and shrugged.
“They might be friendly, if overly grabby in their curiosity,” she pointed out. “Lars, the moment we’re inside, I want you to start taking scans of their materials. Metals, organics, atmosphere if they close the doors and flood the bay—anything you can get. Maria, see if you can do the same. Brad . . . stand by on the guns, just in case. I’d like to think these aliens, whoever they are, are friendly . . . but we know from the foresight dreams that some of the xenotypes we’ll meet will not be. If nothing else, I will go outside and free the ship so we can leave—I don’t have to have help pulling those claw-jaws open, remember.”
“It wouldn’t be wise to send you alone,” Maria warned her while Jackie worked on getting the comm system warmed up and pinging.
“I’m already suited, as it is—Aloha 9 to MacArthur Station, we have made First Contact with an unknown species; I repeat, we have made First Contact with an unknown species,” she asserted, not waiting for an actual reply once she got pingback. “We are being hauled into some sort of large ship’s hangar bay, estimated size around forty decks. The hangar bay looks big enough for three shuttles, and . . . whoa . . . aliens with tentacles, that is not a good sign.”
Her console buzzed as they started to cross the opening. Jackie swore, hand slapping the console to shut off the hyperrelay, though the fail-safes had already tripped. “Atmosphere! They have some sort of . . . of force field that’s keeping the air inside! Dammit, even if it’s just a pinhole hyperrift . . . !”
“Thank you for not blowing us up, señorita,” Maria praised Jackie, crossing herself. “I’d rather not die on a First Contact date.”
“De nada, and neither would I,” Jackie muttered back.
She eyed the space-suited figures, with their curling arm-limbs, bulky bodies, and wrong-pointing knees, and tried not to think too closely on the memories she had pulled from five of the precognitives who’d had those recent, predictive visions of aliens and other things. Tentacle-armed aliens were pretty much the bad guys, according to multiple precog consensus. Mind racing, she tried to figure out what to do.
“I think we should stay in the ship until we see what they intend to do. But . . . I’ll go stay in the portside airlock and try to read their minds from there. If they try to open up the ship one way or another, I’ll go out and make First Contact in person rather than from a careful distance.”
“Major, that is very dangerous,” Robert warned her, using her rank to remind everyone that she was officially now in charge. She could feel him pushing that message at the edge of her mental walls, wanting Brad at the very least to grasp the change in power.
“I know it is, but this is why I am here. I’ll power up my helm but not seal it until I have to go out,” she added, adjusting in her seat as the cushions started pressing into her thighs and buttocks. “I . . . wait, is that . . . gravity?”
The others looked at her, looked down, then looked around. Lars spotted it first, pointing at Ayinda’s hair. “Ayinda, your dreadlocks are not floating anymore. They’re starting to hang down.”
“Boot me,” Robert breathed, looking out the front windows. “They have artificial gravity . . .”
CHAPTER 5
The pull of gravity increased perceptibly, and Lars quickly bent over his console controls. “Let us hope it is not much higher than Earth-normal.”
“Do we put down the landing gear?” Brad asked, as the cables, being manipulated by robotic arms, started to shift and lower them.
“I’d rather not,” Robert returned, twisting in his seat to look Jackie’s way. “Putting down the gear opens up part of the ship, sir, exposing the wheel wells. Ceristeel’s pretty tough, but it’s thin in the wells, and there are a few exposed sections that aren’t armored at all in there. I’d rather let the ship rest on its belly than give these aliens access to our innards. The hull can take it, so long as their version of gravity won’t kill us.”
“Agreed,” Jackie returned quickly. She pulled her gaze away from the bay, working to unbuckle herself from her chair with one gloved hand while the other poked at the controls. Thankfully, modern p-suit gloves were vastly superior for working in than the air-inflated ones in the old-fashioned kind, or the secondhand waldo gloves of a true hardsuit.
“Ow . . . something’s underneath me . . .” Ayinda muttered, adjusting herself in her seat. She squirmed again, and finally dug out a pen from under her rump. Clipping it to her station, she shook her head. “Artificial gravity. Great. Technologically advanced First Contact with a most likely hostile species, and I’m sitting here in my underwear, on a pen I didn’t realize was floating underneath me until now. This is going to look great on the history vids. Presuming we all survive.”
“We’ll survive,” Jackie muttered back, fixing her station so that it would provide several different camera hookups and an audio feed to her p-suit’s helmet, and a second audio feed to the headset hooked around her ear. “I don’t know how just yet, but we’ll survive. There . . . everything’s set up for remote control on my end. I’m headed to the airlock—at least I can walk there, now.”
“At least they’re pulling us in with the right orientation toward the floor—ha!” Brad exclaimed, as the cable attached to the front of their ship, visible through the front viewports, detached. “It’s no longer messing with our nose cone!”
“Let’s run a diagnostic to make
sure it’s still aligned for proper use,” Robert ordered him. “Major, permission to orient the ship toward that opening? We don’t have to worry about twisting damage nearly as much with the nose cone now free.”
“Granted,” Jackie allowed, unbuckling the last of her straps, freeing herself from her seat.
“Gravity has stabilized,” Lars told everyone while Jackie worked her way out of her seat into the aisle. “It seems to have settled at 0.87Gs.” For a moment, he managed a smile despite the serious situation they were in. “That should be just enough to put a spring in your step.”
“I’m just happy it’s not twice Earth’s gravity, or some other ridiculously hard-to-manage number,” Maria replied. “High gravity stresses the body in ways that . . .”
Jackie palmed open the cockpit door and let it slide shut behind her, cutting off Maria’s next words. Her helmet dangled awkwardly down her back, bumping into the top of her buttocks with the sway of the ship as Robert gently fired the thrusters, twisting it on its hull with a scrape that rattled briefly through the ship. She had other things to think about.
These aliens were the ones the precognitive visions had warned about. They were quite distinctive, too. Heads like frogs, legs like ostriches, arms like an octopus split in half and stuck on each limb. The others in the visions looked like cats, or lizards, or spiders, or weird four-armed beings with fluffy hair-stuff and big black eyes. Only the ones that were repeatedly foreseen committing acts of harm toward the others looked like frog-octopus things. Frogtopi. Frogtopusses. Evil, horrible, bloodthirsty things. She could feel herself starting to sweat and shook her head to clear it.
Calm yourself . . . A wayward curl escaped the pins holding her hair in place. Scooping it up, she felt for a pin, wound the lock in among the others bunned on top of her head, and pinned it back in place. She headed toward the side airlock, positioned over one wing. Calm and center, ground . . . dammit, can’t ground in space; make a bigger bag for your negative energies, cleanse it, and use it to power your shields . . . That’s better.
“What is the atmosphere like out there, Lars?” Jackie asked through her headset mic, once she felt calm again.
“Close to ours,” he reported. “It’s 76 percent nitrogen, 19 percent oxygen, carbon dioxide is a little high at 0.52 percent, but the atmospheric pressure is low, just under eight hundred kilopascals.”
“That is a little low, but not enough to endanger anyone—start worrying if it reaches five hundred, or the carbon dioxide reaches 4 percent,” Maria interjected. “At 5 percent, your coordination starts to suffer noticeably, and five hundred kilopascals is where you start having trouble exercising in half-sea-level air pressure. Anything else, Lars? Any trace gases to worry about?”
Lars finished his report. “The rest . . . lesser gases, typical stuff for an M-class world, plus some hydrocarbon-like particles—I think they’re using some sort of fancy biodiesel fuel, high powered but old-fashioned. Trace amounts, but nothing near toxic levels, correct, Doctor?”
“Correct. But that doesn’t account for any possible pathogens, that’s just the molecules detectable in the air.”
“If I have to go out there, I promise I’ll keep my helmet on for as long as possible,” Jackie reassured them.
“It is also very humid,” Lars added. “Ambient temperature is . . . thirty-one Celsius . . . and humidity is 93 percent. Over 4 percent of the air out there is water vapor.”
“Bootstrap me,” Brad breathed into his headset pickup. “That’s some pretty thick sweating weather out there. At least it’s not in the upper thirties.”
“It’s over forty Celsius up at the hangar ceiling,” Lars pointed out. “The bay height is just short of thirty meters.”
“That’s good to know, but are they moving toward this ship?” Jackie asked. She reached behind her back to try to get ahold of her helmet. It was awkward. Batting at the thing three times, she gave up and brought it up and around via telekinesis. “What are the aliens doing?”
“From the looks of things, they have what appear to be scanner machines in their . . . tentacles?” Robert told her. “Looks like they’re trying to get a reading, first. And there are some hovering things.”
“Probably cameras,” Brad offered. “They’re too small to be weapons systems, from the looks of things. At least, I hope they’re not flying grenades.”
“Accessing my heads-up,” Jackie stated, adjusting the helmet so that it sat offset from the O-ring, allowing her to breathe the Aloha’s air. “I am going to pick some of the aliens and attempt to scan their mind. Maria, use the two-tone signal I set up to get my attention.”
“Ready,” the doctor relayed.
Several miniature viewpoints appeared on the inner curve of her helmet, each one a different camera angle of the world beyond their ship. She studied each one, blink-coded off the ones that had nothing useful, and studied the remaining six that had the most aliens in view. Each one within the hangar bay appeared to be in a pressure-suit of some sort.
There was also a large viewport behind them, up one floor from the looks of it, and those aliens were not in pressure-suits. The glass, or whatever it was, bore a bit of a tint that made it hard to see through, but the skin colors looked beigeish. More on the greenish side of beige, though, rather than the brownish beige of a Human.
First, one of the nearest ones. Those do look like scanner equipment . . . Orienting herself in the airlock so that she faced the same way as the camera, Jackie unfurled her mind. She had sensed by now enough of the thoughts of the other five Humans on board the Aloha 9 to quickly identify and set their presences aside; once that was done, she became aware of just how many aliens were nearby. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.
She couldn’t sense any form of shielding, which meant all of those minds were open to her, unsuspecting. Cold, slimy—was that her subconscious projecting that mental imagery? Amphibians and cephalopods were water-based creatures, but an octopus was actually rather intelligent, comparatively . . . Her xenotelepathy latched lightly onto a random thought; one of them was remembering its—his?—childhood. Images, not words. Feelings, not words. Impulses, not words. That was fine, though. Most people didn’t stop to think in actual words unless they actually stopped to think, in her experience.
. . . Swimming and breathing underwater, but the mental images were harsh and hungry. Fierce with the need to hunt, cowed by the even more ferocious mother figure who swam nearby. His instincts still screamed that he would obey Her or be eaten, the Mother Huntress . . . but for now, he had to obey his commanding officers only because they were in power. If he found an opportunity to advance within the rules . . . say an “accident” . . .
Jackie pulled back, blinking, eyes seeing but not registering the white walls of the airlock. Oh, those are unpleasantly vicious thoughts . . . but at least I can make mental contact, and easier than with a primate or a cetacean, the nine-tenths sentients back home. Easier than a Grey, too . . .
I need to learn their language—basic commands, comprehension of signs, that sort of thing first, she decided. There’d be no point in learning how to greet each other just yet. If First Contact was to be made, it would have to be made face-to-face, and she could do that then. Right now, she needed to know how to get her ship in and out of this ship, how to manipulate doors and lifts and such.
Leaning forward, she sent her mind outward again. She narrowed it down quite a bit, though; too many of those cold, cruel thoughts were out there, so she didn’t cast as broad a net as before. Still cognizant of her own location, her own senses, what she did wasn’t true OOB, out-of-body travel. Just as well; those psis who could go OOB had reported extreme disorientation without a planet to ground them. Skimming a mind here, a thought there, she searched for aliens manipulating controls, for their associated thoughts.
Or rather, for the image-thoughts that would allow her to process nouns and verbs. For those glancing at signs or reading symbols on monitor screens, they looked up, rather than l
ooked level or even down, which was the preferred method for Humans and their version of eye sockets. These aliens’ eyes were built differently, too, seeing a skewed version of colors. Extra colors her brain could not process, and some which looked dull and muted to her, while others were emphasized, almost garish in their own way.
Odd ocular input or not, it still gave her a rapidly growing list of command words. Up, down, left, right, stairwell, lift, numbers for deck designations, sanitation supplies, armory locker, do not use lift in event of an emergency, prey pens . . . prey pens? She followed that particular alien’s thoughts, his body unseen because of the bulkheads between them. His, because females were usually mother-hunters? A pursuit for another time. Prey pens, that was important. Not because she was curious to know what these ate, but because of the horror of learning at the same time two things: what those squiggles on the wall meant linguistically, and what these aliens ate literally.
Confirming the worst of her people’s precognitive visions.
He smacked his microtentacles along the bars of the cages, most of which were now empty. Only five left. That alien ship was alien, strange, unseen before now. No one knew what it was, so the Highest Officer had commanded that one of the prisoners be dragged out to try to identify it. With that series of thought-images came a bit of hunger, a sensation of drooling. A smacking of those broad, frog-like lips. Maybe he would get to beat the prisoner. Maybe even bite a little . . . he wasn’t high-ranked enough to actually chew whole chunks of the prisoner, their Highest Officer, but maybe just a little bite, to help convince the prey to speak . . .
Jackie almost withdrew in disgust, but just then, the cages with prisoners came into range, along with the mental presences of those prisoners . . . and shocked her into losing her grip on that alien’s mind. Humans! Humans! Boot me out an airlock door—that was a Human mind!