The speaker was Morry Morelle – he was in engineering, but speaking through an open comscreen, his own face alight with excitement as he looked at the data.
Alex nodded acknowledgement of the information, but was focussed on communications with the other ship.
‘We are seeking,’ he said, ‘to establish communication with the world we know as Gide. Can we ask if you are from that world, the people we know as Gideans?’
Geed affirmative/agreed/okay planet. We of Gide called Geeduh.
An image appeared on the comms link. Everyone aboard the ship either caught their breath or recoiled. The image was monstrous – a slavering thing with slime dripping from savage, triple-jawed teeth, four arms each equipped with brutal claws, tiny cruel eyes and a horned crest.
Alex swallowed. Fear that they had just attracted the attention of a species even more terrifying than the Marfikians made the responsibility for what he was doing suddenly almost too much to bear. He became aware that he was on his feet, purely because his legs were shaking under him. Thoughts flashed through his head. What have I done? What have we brought upon humanity? At the same time, he was trying to remind himself that the Solarans had said that there was no species their side of the Firewall which presented a threat to humans. He was also trying to remind himself that you should not judge any being by its outer appearance.
‘That’s not right,’ Shion said, as dismayed sounds came from all around the ship. She was studying the image with a critical air. ‘Nobody looks like that,’ she told them, with the certainty of someone who’d grown up amongst gardens adorned with statues of other ancient races. ‘That’s like something from a movie,’ she observed.
Alex stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the image, trying to make sense of it. He was remembering something that Shion had told them before, that the Gideans – or Gider as they had identified themselves – were known to have expressed keen interest in human holovision and had asked the Solarans to obtain more movies for them. Alex actually had a movie-bundle for them, brought along in the hope of being able to offer it as a goodwill gift.
‘Actually...’ Murg Atwood was at the command table, too, her role to provide data analysis. She had already captured a screen image of the slavering slime-creature and run it through image comparison search, ‘a holovision mini-series called E.L.E.’
She’d put the information on a subscreen, with at-a-glance key points summarised. Alex saw that it was a very old series, dated seventy six years ago, produced on Sharfur by a company called Monster Hunt Productions. E.L.E. stood for Extinction Level Event. Judging from the promo-images Murg had pulled up, it was a very low budget sci-fi monster flick, stretched out to ten hours no doubt with the usual cardboard characters having personal relationship crises in the midst of an alien invasion. Murg, however, had also found it listed in an XD file. It was part of a much bigger package, capturing all the broadcasts that had been on live view channels on Chartsey on a particular day seventy three years before, itself part of a very much bigger data set of ‘typical day on Chartsey’ information. It was identified as ‘The Athenall Set’ after the diplomat who’d led the team collecting and collating the data, handing it over to the Solarans in response to a request for more information about life on the capital world. E.L.E had been just one of thousands of programmes listed on the live view channels that day. All channels tried to keep their viewers interested by running a few broadcasts live, as well as all the massive listings any channel offered. It just made things easy for viewers to flick on a channel and choose from a handful of programmes on offer right there, rather than delving through listings.
Alex understood all that. What he didn’t understand was why the Gider would send such an image of themselves in a first contact encounter. What kind of people would do that?
Then he saw that Shion was grinning.
‘It’s a joke,’ she told him.
‘Ah.’ A glimmer of understanding dawned. Alex could see that the Gider might find it funny, the way that humans portrayed aliens in their entertainment. It was still a weird thing to do, though, at such an important moment, the critical first phase of introductions. Nobody was laughing on the Heron, though they looked relieved at the news that they were not after all making first contact with such a terrifying looking species. Everyone but Shion just looked bewildered, and even she just looked tolerantly amused.
‘They do have a reputation for being annoyingly frivolous,’ she reminded Alex.
Alex began to feel that he understood the Solaran point of view, there.
‘All right,’ he said, and having taken a breath to steady himself, put his hand back on the comms panel, addressing the Gider. ‘Reference acknowledged,’ he said, tagging that with a copy of the E.L.E. file. ‘But may we please request a genuine image of your people?’
Code indicating laughter.
Then another image appeared. Alex recognised it at once from Shion’s description of the statue she’d seen on Pirrell. The Gider were humanoid, though would never pass for human even in the most cosmopolitan crowd. They had a barrel-shaped torso, with extraordinarily long, spider-like arms and legs and high, steeply angled shoulders. Their heads were long ovoids. Their eyes were quite large, flat and moist-looking, set low in their faces, with broad flaring noses and little button mouths. They had no hair, but the upper and side parts of their heads were covered with delicate fern-like structures, like dusky-pink fronds of lacy seaweed.
‘External lungs!’ Rangi exclaimed. He’d suspected as much, from Shion’s description, theorising that Gide was a low gravity world with low atmospheric pressure. He got quickly to work, drawing what conclusions he could, medically, from the image they had. One of the first things he spotted was the Gider had six fingers, or rather, five long straw-thin fingers and an opposable thumb. The very first thing he spotted, given that the image had no clothes on, was that it was male.
Alex, however, did not have time to study the image for long, as another message was already coming in. It was actually part of the message that they had been broadcasting for the last eight weeks, a standard part of the first contact pack. It used a series of diagrams to suggest how a meeting might be arranged. The diagrams showed two large representations of ships, small shuttles breaking off from each and meeting in the middle. Further diagrams showed how triple safety glass, forcefields and strict quarantine could enable an encounter to take place, safely, with both sides able to see and speak to one another directly but never sharing atmosphere. The message that the Heron had been putting out gave that suggestion along with clear diagrammatic directions to where the Diplomatic Corps ship was attempting to make contact. The Gider ship, though, when it signalled it back to them, used a diagram that made it clear that they meant the Heron.
Four unit minutes?
Alex felt his stomach constrict, and his mouth went dry. He was obliged to swallow again, before he could reply.
‘We will need time to prepare.’ He looked at Rangi, who was nodding frantically.
‘Twenty minutes at least,’ the medic said, as if the skipper needed telling that.
‘Twenty five minutes.’ Alex asked the Gider. ‘We would like to bring one shuttle containing first contact team – Alex von Strada, Rangi Tekawa, Shionolethe, Murgat Atwood.’
That list had not been arrived at without long and hard debate, though at the time they’d laughed about it, too, knowing how very unlikely it was that they would ever need to implement the plans that they were making. This, the first contact meeting procedure, had been their wildest ‘what if’, not something any of them had ever expected to be doing for real.
They had a plan, though, even for this, and Alex being Alex, they had even practised it.
Affirmative/agreed/okay.
Then, a second later, another message.
We desire/request/want the lizard.
Consternation rippled through the ship.
‘They want Lucky?’ Rangi looked alarmed. ‘What for?’
It was in all their minds that the aliens might want to eat the gecko alive or do horrible experiments on it, though they would be ashamed to say so out loud.
Alex hesitated. He was remembering what the advice in the Diplomatic Corps briefing said about asking for assurances of safety before agreeing to meetings. It was, as they put it, contra-indicated. To even ask the question conveyed fear and lack of trust. And if you didn’t trust them in the first place, why would you trust their answer? The lizard, after all, would be on their side of the quarantine barrier – given the interest the Gider had shown even in dust mites, it was likely that they were just curious about it.
‘We have to trust them,’ Alex said. ‘We’re trusting them with our safety – why would we not trust them with a pet gecko, Rangi?’
‘Well – okay,’ Rangi said, rather unwillingly. ‘But there’s no question of us handing him over to them – right?’
‘I doubt that will arise. Quarantine, remember?’ Alex said, and with that, touched the companel that would turn his speech to a broadcast text signal. ‘Affirmative, agreed, okay.’
Then he looked at Buzz. He did not need to say anything. Buzz looked back at him, an awed look on his own face, but nodding to tell Alex that he could rely on him.
‘All right,’ Alex said, and there was just a slight tremor in his voice, this time, though a look of pure joy on his face. ‘Start decontamination prep on shuttle four. XD team to sickbay.’
They went through full decontamination procedure in sickbay. It was not a pleasant experience. Fifteen minutes later Alex had been subjected to a high powered enema, chemicals that had scoured three layers off his skin, jets that squirted stinging disinfectants up his nose and in his ears, anti-pathogen inhalants that sandblasted his lungs, an emetic that had made him throw up, then a chemical he had to drink that was like swallowing pink slime. He’d had his teeth, tongue and the rest of his mouth cleaned so thoroughly it had hurt, and had had to gargle with something that tasted like antifreeze. He now had anti-pathogen pads stuck under his tongue that made his saliva taste of disinfectant. He had filters stuck up his nose and in his throat, and tip-seals across all his finger and toenails. The things they’d done with filters and plastic seals in more intimate regions were not something he’d want to discuss with anyone. Full quarantine decontam was excruciatingly uncomfortable. As he emerged from it wearing a clean-room rig under a sterile survival suit, though, Alex had never been happier in his life.
Judging from the grins on their faces, the same was true for the others.
‘I can’t believe ... thank you, skipper.’ Murg said, and Alex grinned back, glancing around at the team and feeling that he’d made a good choice, here. It was tempting to take more, many more, but all the advice on this one from the diplomats was to keep meeting teams small, certainly no more than four or five people at the most. Ideally, a diplomat would want a support team that included a linguist, medic and exo-anthropologist. Alex felt that Shion, Rangi and Murg had all the skills, between them, that he might need.
‘I haven’t decontaminated Lucky,’ Rangi said. He had the gecko in a biohazard box with clear-view sides, encased inside another sterile airbag.
‘Fair enough,’ said Alex, recognising that putting the lizard through what the rest of them had just endured would be cruelty to animals. The lizard was already certified entirely disease free, and kept so by Rangi’s meticulous care. And it was, after all, triple-secured in the biohazard bag, sealed box and internal survival bag. ‘So – are we ready?’
They were ready. They still had to go through one more decontamination step – shuttle four had been completely sterilised within, and they had to go through suit-decontam in the airlock as they went aboard. All of them had been keeping an eye on comm screens as they went through decontamination. They knew that Buzz had signalled an explanation about the quarantine procedures they were taking. He’d tried to make technical arrangements for the meeting, too, asking if the encounter-craft the other ship would be sending would be compatible docking with their shuttle’s airlock, and sending technical specs. This had got an answer of Do not feel apprehension/ fright/ fear.
How could they not, though, as they launched the shuttle and made their way through deceleration to come to a halt at the point indicated for the meeting. Adrenalin levels were heart-thumpingly high. All four of them had, at some point in their childhood, looked up at the stars and yearned. All four of them had said, at some point in their childhood, that when they grew up they wanted to go into space and meet aliens. Adults had laughed, and as they had grown up, the humans at least had learned that going into space was about science and hard work and that meeting aliens was the province of diplomats.
And now here they were, out here on the edge of human space, making first contact.
Shion had something of an advantage, Alex realised. She’d already done this once before, coming to human space, meeting a people she knew so little about that at first they could barely communicate.
‘In position, skipper,’ she told Alex, having piloted them to a halt.
‘Quarantine secured,’ Rangi reported, having just finished doing final checks on the clear-view quarantine panels over the airlocks, and the anti-pathogen drenched atmosphere. They could not take any more precautions than that.
‘Ready, sir,’ Murg confirmed her own readiness, her voice tense but her face alight. Then, in the next moment, as she saw what was happening to the Gider ship, she gave a little cry of astonishment. ‘Look at that!’
That was a bubble, forming out of the glistening surface of the ship, just as a tiny soap bubble might form and pop out of a larger one.
Tiny, in this case, being a relative term. The bubble that came floating over towards them might be tiny in relation to its mother ship, but it was still considerably bigger than the frigate, never mind the shuttle.
‘Diameter – 327.9 metres, oscillating to 283.1 metres,’ Murg informed them. ‘Same frequency as the main ship.’
‘How are we supposed to dock with that?’ Shion wondered, with the eye of a pilot.
‘I think we have to leave that to them,’ Alex observed.
None of them spoke, though, as the glimmering bubble approached. When it touched their hull, a little frisson ran through the shuttle, a tremor so slight that Alex wasn’t sure, himself, whether it was the shuttle or just his own nerves. In the same moment, though, he realised that the bubble was not docking with them, it was actually moving over them, enclosing them.
Rangi gave a little yelp of alarm, at that, instantly apologised for, ‘Sorry, skipper.’
Alex took no notice. An alert was going off on the shuttle’s flight console and he was right there with Shion, checking it out. It was a gravity alert, their artificial gravity systems under strain because they were having to work against another gravity pull.
‘Oh – I get it!’ Shion made sense of the readings before Alex could, and pointed it out to him. ‘We’ve landed, skipper – parked. Only...’ she flipped her hand over. ‘Upside down.’
The shuttle was, indeed, parked on its roof. Shion held her hand over the gravity control and looked at him for permission, and at his slight nod, glided it to neutral balance so that they went into freefall.
‘Where are we?’ Rangi asked, confused.
‘Inside their shuttle, I think,’ Alex told him.
‘Some kind of hangar deck,’ Murg was making sense of data from their scanners, now that she knew that they were upside down. ‘We’re in a hangar – pressurised, Chartsey norm, gravity, 1 gee.’
‘Well that’s not a coincidence,’ Rangi observed.
Are you secure/safe/okay?
The signal appeared on their comms, and Alex responded.
‘We are safe, yes, thank you. May we open our outer airlock door?’
We desire/request/want... A pictorial sequence showed four humanoid figures and a lizard getting out of a shuttle and standing together next to it.
‘Negative, i
nadvisable.’ Alex sent back an image of them staying on their side of a clear-view doorway. ‘We are concerned at the risk of pathogen contamination of your atmosphere’
We desire/request/want... the ‘get out of the shuttle’ image was repeated, and this time with an assurance, Quarantine will not be compromised/broken/busted.
Encounter vehicle/unit/pod has isolation/solitude/by itself.
Encounter vehicle/unit/pod will not reintegrate/return/go back.
No physical existence/presence/being of Gider in encounter vehicle/unit/pod.
Risk of quarantine to be compromised/broken/busted equals zero.
‘They’re not here?’ Rangi sounded crushingly disappointed. ‘It’s just, like, an observation pod for them to be able to see us?’
We desire/request/want... the message came again, this time linked to the profiles they’d sent of themselves.
We desire/request/want Alexis Sean von Strada.
We desire/request/want Rangi Tekawa.
We desire/request/want Shionolethe.
We desire/request/want Murgat Rose Atwood.
We desire/request/want the lizard.
‘All right,’ Alex looked around at them. They had lost comms with the ship the moment that the bubble closed around them – starship comms, after all, relied upon transmission of light-based signals on hull mounted comms arrays. The Heron couldn’t see them in here, so – no comms. They were all acutely aware that they were, the four of them, entirely on their own in this. ‘I’m going out,’ Alex told them. ‘If I think it’s safe, the rest of you can follow.’
Nobody argued. They just did their jobs. Shion remained at the controls, ready to fire up the shuttle’s engines and pilot them away if the need arose, though whether they would be able to exit the forcefield by themselves was a highly debatable point. Rangi and Murg got busy on screens, ready to analyse the conditions outside the shuttle before the skipper set foot out there.
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