The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative

by Mark Terence Chapman

  “Yeah, whatever. Can you back it up and rerun the last part? I thought I saw a momentary change in the appearance of the dome, but I can’t swear to it.”

  “Sure thing, Swede. Just give me a sec.”

  I was watching the dome intently, thus when the shimmer returned I was ready. “Did you see it this time, Tom?”

  “I sure did! It definitely lightened for a moment right there.” His finger pointed to the exact spot where I’d been focusing.

  “Sparks!” I hollered over the noise of the synthochant in the background. “It did it again. Whatever is in the program definitely had an effect. And can you turn down that racket? I can’t concentrate.”

  “Um, I hate to tell you, Swede, but I haven’t started rerunning the sequence yet. The program wasn’t sending out anything at all for the last ten seconds or so.”

  Tom and I exchanged puzzled looks.

  “So, why…?” Tom began. Just then, a particularly raucous syntho passage blared over the radio.

  “Sorry, guys—I’ll turn it down.” Before he could do so, the dome began flashing intermittently.

  “You don’t suppose…?” Tom said.

  “Sparks!” I called out. “It’s the music! Something—the dissonance or the harmonics, or whatever—is making the dome go nuts!”

  “You’re kidding. Wait—I see it on the monitor! And the sensors are picking up energy spikes from the dome. This is the first time the sensors detected that there’s anything down there besides you. Let me keep working on it.”

  “Cap, did you catch all that?” I called again.

  “Sure did. Guido and I were just finishing a meal and listening to your radio chatter. We’re heading to the bridge to see if we can do anything to help.”

  “Roger. Tom and I will stay down here for a while in case anything happens.”

  “Sounds good, but be careful,” Cap advised. “We have no idea what that dome is capable of, or who might be in there.”

  I nodded. Silly, of course, because Cap couldn’t see me. “Aye, Cap—though I don’t know what we could do if an army of death ray-wielding aliens came charging out of the dome.”

  Several minutes went by before we heard from Sparks. “Guys, I’ve slaved the music program and the sensors to the first-contact software in a sort of feedback loop. Whenever something happens down there in response to some aspect of the music, the sensors will pick it up and the software will use the characteristics of the music at that moment to look for patterns. With any luck, the program will gradually winnow down the “useless” parts, leaving only the aspects of the music that have an effect. It’ll analyze the various responses the dome is making, both visible and invisible to the naked eye. Eventually I hope to have a vocabulary of sorts. That would allow us to understand which signals elicit which responses. It won’t necessarily open the door for us, at least not right away, but it’s a start. I hate to say it, Swede, but it means ‘all syntho, all the time,’ as the DJs back home like to say. And I have quite a collection of synthos to go through. At least there’ll be some variety.” His amusement wasn’t entirely masked by the music.

  I gritted my teeth. “Wonderful. I guess I’ll have to live with it for the time being. Why don’t these damn suit radios have a volume control?”

  Tom grinned at me in sympathy.

  Sparks’ ad hoc “alien signal analyzer and translator” program seemed to work as advertised. As it digested song after song, the flashing and pulsing of the dome increased in frequency and intensity. Soon the flashes began to take on various hues and shades and even patterns of color.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing up there,” Tom radioed, “but it’s sure having an effect!”

  “Not just in the visible range, either,” Sparks replied. “I’m reading pulses all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s possible the entrance key is a combination of many frequency ranges, not just one. That would complicate things.”

  “Great,” Tom said. “Just what we need—more complications!”

  * * * *

  The “special-effects light show” continued for hours, and Tom and eventually I had to return to Shamu for air and food. Cap and Guido took over the “dome watch” duty. Sparks slaved away with single-minded dedication, tuning this program parameter and tweaking that communications setting, hardly pausing to eat or sleep. In fact, I don’t think he would have done either if someone hadn’t prodded him once in a while. Gradually, though, there began to be a rhythm of sorts to the dome activity below.

  “I think we’re finally making some progress,” Sparks reported at last. “Watch. I can make it flash red, then yellow in front of Cap. See? And I can make a series of green sort-of-square shapes chase themselves clockwise starting from the starboard rock wall and swinging around to the wall on the port side—there!”

  “Son-of-a-gun! You did it!” Cap exulted. “Now, how do we get in?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Sparks replied, much to my disappointment. “So far, all I know how to do is change the colors on the dome. The computer and I are still working on our alien Rosetta Stone. It’ll take some time before we get to the more complicated stuff. Just because I’ve learned how to stack two bricks atop one another doesn’t mean I’m ready to begin building the Eiffel Tower.

  “I was right, earlier, about it being complicated. Just to make the patterns and colors change involves signals in twenty-seven different frequency ranges. The important thing is that we’re actually communicating with a piece of alien technology!”

  “That’s a marvelous accomplishment, Sparks!” Cap gushed. He sounded like a proud papa. “Keep up the good work! Meanwhile, we’re enjoying the floor show down here.”

  We continued like this for another day and a half, the rest of us trading shifts on the moon while Sparks worked tirelessly on the bridge. Strictly speaking, there was no need for anyone to be on the moon. In fact, it would have been more comfortable to watch from the comfort of the ship. But fascination with the process, and excitement over the possibility of finally meeting aliens, drew us like moths to a flame. I just hoped we weren’t about to get burned by it.

  As Sparks and the computer fiddled and twiddled with the communications gear, the light display grew ever more sophisticated. Soon, whitish iridescent patches began to appear with regularity. Then there was only one vaguely translucent shimmering oval shape in the dome. All other activity had ceased.

  “Gentlemen,” Sparks called out, triumphantly, “it took signals in no less than seventy-nine different frequency ranges, but I believe we have our door. Cap, our portal to immortality awaits.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Sparks’ accomplishment was cause for an impromptu meeting aboard Shamu. Under other circumstances, we might have been celebrating, but for all we knew we were walking to our deaths through what we began calling the alien portal.

  “I’ll be blunt,” Cap began. A somber group sat before him. “We don’t know what we’ll find inside that dome. Hell, maybe Guido’s right and there are aliens hiding in there waiting to disintegrate us.” The rest of us smiled at Guido’s flush of embarrassment.

  Cap continued. “Because of the historic nature of this moment, and because we’re all friends as well as shipmates, I’m going to waive the requirement that at least one crewman remain aboard at all times. Either we all go in or none of us does. No one back home will fault us if we decide to wait to let the experts examine the interior of the dome first.

  “Does anyone want to return home to the fame and fortune that awaits us, or would you all rather risk everything—including the possibility of a painful death—to get the first peek at the inside of the dome?”

  We all looked at each other for a moment, then Guido spoke up. “Hey, between the tesserene and the dome, we’ve already hit the biggest lottery jackpot in history—twice. I say we let the bet ride. All or nothing.”

  With all the reservations about aliens that Guido had expressed ever since we found the bootprint on the asteroid,
I never would have guessed that he’d be the first one pressing to go inside the dome!

  He continued. “If we were the types to play it safe, we wouldn’t be in this line of work.”

  We all nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  “All right, then. It’s decided. We go in,” Cap concluded. “But first…Sparks, I want you to set up a homing beacon. If we don’t return, anyone searching for us will find the ship and be able to access the ship’s logs and find out what we’ve been up to, including all the mining claims that need to be filed, as well as how to get into the dome. Let’s make sure our families are taken care of, just in case.”

  * * * *

  We all piled into Pod 2 for the short trip into the history books. Tom piloted and Sparks rode shotgun. The pod’s cargo hold was large enough for Guido, Cap, me, and some extra air canisters—just in case—with plenty of room to spare. Yet somehow it seemed almost cramped, as if the walls were closing in on us. I suppose the enormity of what we were about to do was finally beginning to sink in. In a few minutes we might be face to face with real live aliens. This wasn’t some sci-fi holonovel. This was real life.

  And possibly real death.

  In my mind, the situation had suddenly gone from an interesting theoretical puzzle to something terrifyingly nontheoretical. My throat had turned to sandpaper and I was finding it difficult to swallow. I looked at Cap’s face and then Guido’s, through their faceplates. From the tightness of their features, it seemed they were entertaining similar thoughts.

  By the time I finished this bit of introspection, we were on the ground, less than thirty meters from the dome. As we skipped across the ground in the low gravity, Tom asked, “So who goes in first?”

  Sparks said, “Cap, of course. He’s our fearless leader. Besides, he’s the oldest and most expendable.” That produced a gale of laughter far in excess of the humor content of his feeble joke. Guido playfully slapped him on the back, sending Sparks into a stumbling lope for the next ten meters.

  After a journey that seemed far longer than thirty meters, we stood in front of the portal. Because the rest of the dome was still essentially invisible to the naked eye, the portal appeared to float in space, just above the ground. Up close, it still shimmered, yet it had a sort of misty quality about it; almost like looking at the surface of a still lake shrouded in fog as the sun comes up over the horizon. The portal was larger than it seemed from a distance—roughly three meters high, by two meters wide.

  Cap reached out hesitantly to touch it. Then, apparently having second thoughts, he bent, picked up a pebble, and tossed it at the portal. The pebble vanished. There was no way to know what happened to it, but at least it hadn’t exploded on contact. Cap again reached for the portal with the palm of his gloved hand. At first he seemed to encounter resistance, as if pressing on the skin of a balloon. After a moment his fingers penetrated the invisible membrane. Cap pulled his hand back quickly and looked at it as if to check that all five fingers were still attached. He turned and addressed the rest of us.

  “We don’t know what we might find in here. We’re unarmed except for our wits, so let’s use them. Right?”

  “Right!” we all agreed. With that, Cap turned and stepped forward. The portal swallowed his hand, followed by his arm, then his torso. Within seconds Cap was gone, entirely inside the alien dome. At least, we hoped that’s where he was. For all we knew, he might have been converted to a puddle of protoplasm on the other side of the portal.

  The rest of us looked at one another, not knowing who should go next. By unspoken agreement, we went in order of seniority, with Sparks going first, then me, then Tom, and finally Guido. It felt almost like wading in water as I stepped through the portal, thinking of booby traps and armed aliens. I was relieved to see Cap and Sparks standing there waiting for me, still alive and seemingly healthy.

  A moment later we all stood just inside the dome, looking around in amazement. The floor appeared to be the same light-absorbing material as the dome, but the dome itself…was gone! That couldn’t be right. There was light, coming from everywhere, and nowhere—but no walls. We had an unobstructed view of the moon in all directions, including Pod 2—except for where the crater wall stood, to our left.

  “Where…what…how…huh?” sputtered Guido.

  “Immortal words to rank right up there with Armstrong’s ‘One small step for man,’” Sparks joked.

  “Sparks makes a good point,” Cap said. “When we get home, the newsies will want to know the first words spoken after we stepped through the portal. We can’t tell them what Guido really said. We need something a bit more dramatic.”

  “How about ‘We came, we saw, we entered’?” That was Sparks again.

  Cap sighed. “I guess we can come up with something on our way home.”

  “Getting back to the main issue,” Tom interjected, “where’s the dome?”

  Sparks turned around to look for the now missing portal. At the edge of the floor, where the dome wall should have been, he raised his hand to run it back and forth along its surface. It appeared that there was a wall there, but invisible. Sparks rapped on it to prove it was solid. We heard nothing.

  “See?” he said. “Well, I guess you can’t see, but the dome’s still here. It absorbs all forms of radiation coming in, which is why we couldn’t see it—no reflected light to see. It also seems to have anechoic properties. It muffles or absorbs sound in here. But why isn’t it dark in the dome? Where is the light coming from?” It was a rhetorical question, but Cap, Guido and I shrugged or shook our heads anyway.

  Tom gave it a shot. “Do you think it’s possible that the dome converts some of the energy it absorbs into visible light that it radiates inside? Or maybe it just lets visible light through but doesn’t reflect it back outside.”

  Sparks shrugged. “Anything’s possible. At this point I don’t know enough about their technology to even hazard a guess.” He consulted his sensor pad again. “There is an atmosphere in here. It’s a bit thinner than we’re used to—about equivalent to that of Denver. You ought to be right at home, Swede. It seems a slightly higher concentration of oxygen makes up for the ‘altitude,’ so it’s eminently breathable.”

  “Do you suppose this is the air the aliens breathe,” Tom pondered aloud, “or were we scanned before we entered and the atmosphere tailored to our needs?”

  “Now you’re making me feel creepy again,” Guido said, with a shiver.

  “I don’t think it really matters,” Sparks responded. “Either way, we can breathe it.”

  Cap jumped in. “Let’s all stay on suit air for now, until we get a better feel for what’s going on.”

  Once we overcame our initial amazement, a new feeling set in—one of disappointment. We, each in his own time, came to the realization that the dome was entirely empty. To verify this, we fanned out and walked all over the dome, hoping to bump into some sort of invisible apparatus, or spot a control panel in the blackness of the floor, but we saw nothing and encountered nothing to trip over. At least there weren’t any bloodthirsty aliens waiting to pounce.

  “That’s it?” Guido blurted out in annoyance. “We spent a week trying to get into this place, for this?” He spread his arms to include the entirety of the vacant dome.

  “Apparently the aliens packed up and left,” Tom offered.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Guido shot back.

  “Or perhaps they never actually lived here,” Tom continued. “Maybe it was just a staging area for the tesserene they mined; or a sort of garage for their equivalent of a pod or some other small ship.”

  “Regardless of what they used this place for, they’re gone now. Maybe the science geeks back home can make something of it,” Sparks suggested. “If nothing else, just figuring out how to create this dome would boost the science of building materials—and maybe the next generation of starships—by centuries.”

  “That’s true,” Guido conceded, somewhat mollified. “It’s not like we’re g
oing home empty-handed. We did figure out how to get inside. That’s an achievement in itself.”

  “‘We?’” Sparks repeated in a mock-stern voice.

  “Okay, you figured out how to get inside,” Guido conceded. “Happy now? I bow to your brilliance.” He proceeded to do just that, to our amusement.

  While this banter progressed, I continued walking around the dome, looking for anything out of the ordinary—as if there was anything “ordinary” about this place. After following the wall of the dome all the way around from the portal to the far side of the dome, I kept going until I reached the part where the dome continued into the rock wall of the crater. As I walked, the view of the sky disappeared, to be replaced by a roof of stone, but the mysterious omnidirectional light continued unabated. As I’d estimated earlier, more of the dome was inside the wall than was exposed. I continued following the dome wall around, resting my fingertips lightly on the invisible wall for guidance as I walked.

  Unexpectedly, I felt a slight tingling in my fingers through my suit—not painful, more like…ticklish. I stopped walking and looked at the place where my fingers rested. There was a faint pinkish glow there, similar in size and shape to the portal through which we entered the dome. I was sure it hadn’t been there before I touched that spot. When I removed my hand, the pink oval vanished. When I repeated the process, the oval again appeared, and then disappeared.

  “Guys, get over here!” I shouted, gesticulating wildly.

  The others came at a run. Until that moment, watching them running normally, I hadn’t noticed that the gravity inside the dome was much higher than that of the moon “outside.” The others seemed surprised as well.

  Sparks checked his portable scanner. “Gravity is almost nine-tenths of Earth normal—eight times higher than outside the dome. I think this settles the issue of whether the atmosphere was specially configured for us. Both the air and the gravity are reasonably close to—but not quite—Earth-normal. Surely aliens capable of building this dome could match our needs better than this if they were trying to. It seems more likely that this is what they’re used to.”