An alien ship. The first one.
“Record the time, Bill,” Hutch said, as she was swept up and embraced by George. George of all people. “Record everything and mark it for the archives.”
“Yes, Hutch. Congratulations, Mr. Hockelmann.”
“Thank you.” George beamed.
They jacked up the magnitude on the rock. It had antennas. And sensors.
“Some of the dishes,” said Bill, “are aimed back at Icepack.”
Hutch directed Bill to angle the approach so they could get a good look at the vessel, above and below, both sides, front and rear.
The exhaust tubes were enormous. But that figured: The engines had to push a lot of mass.
They watched it move toward the snowstorm. The blizzard. The big Slurpy. Why would it do that? Tor looked across at Hutch for the answer.
“Bill,” she asked, “is it under power?”
Bill’s dignified features came on-screen. “Yes, Hutch,” he said, “they have just made a slight course adjustment. It is not a derelict.”
“They’re moving clear of the storm?” she asked.
“No. They seem to be headed right into it.”
A cloud of objects appeared from somewhere beneath the object, not unlike a swarm of insects. They charged forward, toward the blizzard.
Bill locked on one and went to full mag. It looked like a pair of cylinders connected by a gridwork, an engine housing, and thrust tubes. There were sensors and antennas and black boxes. No viewports, nothing that looked like a passenger cabin. No place she could see that might have been home to a pilot.
Now, moving well ahead of the asteroid, the objects plunged into the Slurpy.
“I’m still tracking them,” said Bill.
“What are they doing?”
“Slowing down.”
Something was happening on the asteroid. Hutch watched as it sprouted wings. On both its upper and lower sides gray-black appendages were rising out of the rock. It was taking on the appearance of a malformed bat. Meanwhile it was closing on the Slurpy, running through the trail of whirling snow that was drifting out from the rear of the storm.
“What are those things?” asked Tor. “What’s going on?”
“It’s going to refuel,” said Hutch.
“Are you serious?”
“We have the same capability. To a degree.”
“How do you mean?”
“I think they’re scoops. We have them too. If we run a bit short of fuel, we can dip into the atmosphere of one of these things and fill the tanks.” She turned back to Bill. “Are we picking up anything?”
“There is some electronic leakage,” he said.
“They’re not saying hello?”
“No. They aren’t reacting to us at all.”
“They have to see us by now,” said George. “Bill, would you open a channel to them for me?”
“You want the multichannel, George?”
George looked at Hutch. “Do I?”
“Yes,” she said.
And Tor grinned. “What are you going to tell them?”
“I’m going to say hello.”
The asteroid was easing into the storm.
“You’re on,” said Bill.
“Hello,” said George. “We come in peace for all humankind.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Nick.
George reddened. “Well, what do you want on short notice? I wasn’t ready for this.”
“Too late,” said Nick. “They’ll be reading that line in every school in the world for centuries to come.”
George turned back to the AI’s screen image. “They answer back, Bill?”
“Negative. No response.”
The asteroid moved deeper into the Slurpy and gradually lost definition.
BILL STARTED A countdown and, on schedule, the object emerged from the storm, followed by the cloud of shuttles. The wings folded back, the shuttles caught up and merged with the main body, the object fired guide thrusters to adjust its orbit, and continued on its way.
“It is currently on course to pass through the storm again on its next orbit,” said Bill.
George got back on his channel and tried again. “Hello,” he said. “Hello over there.” He grinned up at Alyx. “This is us over here. Please blink a light or waggle your wings or something.”
Silence poured out of the speaker.
“I’m sure you guys run into folks out here all the time,” he added.
“What now?” asked Tor.
Alyx punched up a couple of pieces of toast. “It’s a chindi,” she said.
What in hell was a chindi?
“Navajo term. A spirit of the night.”
“Dangerous?” asked Nick.
“All spirits are dangerous,” said Tor. He gazed down at Alyx, who was getting out some strawberry jam for her toast. “What’s your Navajo connection?” he asked.
“My grandfather.” She smiled innocently. “He maintains it’s where I got my good looks.”
“But you’re blond.”
“My looks. Not my coloring.”
“So what’s it going to do now?” asked George, bored with hair color and Navajo grandfathers.
“I’d guess,” said Hutch, “it will come around and go through the Slurpy again.”
“Didn’t get enough the first time?”
“Right. As big as they are, I’d expect it’ll take a while.”
“How exactly does it work?” asked Alyx.
Hutch didn’t really know. “Somehow they’ve managed to get the troposphere to cough up a lot of ammonia ice. That’s the Slurpy.”
“Is ammonia fuel?” asked Alyx.
“More or less. They probably break it down into hydrogen and nitrogen. Throw the nitrogen overboard, liquefy and store the hydrogen. That’s the fuel. And maybe reaction mass, as well.”
“It doesn’t sound possible, though,” said Tor. “How do you get the atmosphere to throw off all that ammonia?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Can’t see past the storm to figure out how they’re doing it.”
“At least it’s not just a hulk,” said George.
“Were you worried that it would be?”
“Frankly, yes.”
Hutch shook her head. “I’d have been surprised if that had turned out to be the case.”
“Why?”
“The grave at the Retreat. The fresh one. And the tracks. These are very likely the folks who left them.”
“And buried the occupants.”
“And buried one of the occupants.” She looked out at the Twins. “Yes. I mean, it’s not as if this is a crowded neighborhood. They may or may not be connected with whoever built the Retreat. That’s a long time ago. Probably, these guys were just cruising through the neighborhood and saw it. Same as we did.”
“It’s an odd coincidence,” said Alyx.
“What’s that?”
“This place has probably only had two visitors in three thousand years, and they come within a few days of each other.”
THE OBJECT GREW progressively larger in the screens. Bill opened the wall panels in mission control so they could look directly at it, could get a sense of the immensity of the thing. As the Memphis closed, their perspective changed, they could no longer see the ship as a whole. Instead they were looking down on a rockscape that stretched away in all directions. It was scarred and battered, covered with snow. Ridges and fractures scattered across the surface, and occasional craters, mixed with clusters of antennas and sensors and other electronic gear, much of which Hutch couldn’t identify.
They were moving more slowly than the object, watching it pass beneath them, watching the rocky surface gradually lose its irregularity, becoming smooth, becoming metal, and rising toward them. The rise became a hill and the hill became cylindrical, became one of two, twin cylinders, gray and cold and pockmarked. Then the cylinders moved ahead and they saw there were four of them, two abreast, and they became tubes, massive thrusters at the rear of the
vessel.
“Big,” said Tor.
“What do you want to do?” Hutch asked George.
“What do you recommend?”
“Keep talking to them, and sit back and watch.”
“If they leave,” said Nick, “would we be able to follow them?”
“Depends on their technology. The Hazeltines are theoretically the only way a jump can be made. If that’s true, if that’s what they have, then yes. We just watch where they’re headed, and join them there.”
“We can tell which star?”
“It’s just a matter of following their line of sight. Connect the dots. Yes, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
They went into a parallel orbit, trailing slightly behind, and maintaining a discreet separation. There was no indication that the asteroid, the chindi, was aware of their presence.
But George was becoming restive. “I don’t understand why they don’t answer,” he said. And a thought occurred to him: “When do we expect Mogambo?”
“In about nine days. Why?”
“If somebody shakes hands with these critters, I’d like it to be us.” He had made a fist and was pushing it against his lips. “How about blinking the lights?”
“We could try it. What do you like? Three shorts, three longs?”
“That’s good.”
She did it manually, after they drew alongside the chindi, using the forward navigation lamps.
Blinkblinkblink.
Blaht. Blaht. Blaht.
And again.
The chindi glided through the night. They were on the dark side of Autumn now, away from the Slurpy. Far below, vast towers of cumulus filled the sky. Lightning flickered, massive bolts, some long enough to go round the Earth.
“Try again,” said George.
She turned the job over to Bill, who blinked front and rear, top and bottom.
“Maybe they don’t see us.”
“That’s not possible, George.”
“Then why don’t they respond? This has to be just as significant for them as it is for us.”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Be careful about assumptions.”
“We’re still not hearing anything on the radio, right?”
“No.”
They kept trying. They passed through the last of the night, crossed the terminator, and emerged into the dawn. And they watched Cobalt rise. The chindi glided across the arm of the world.
Meantime they took to magnifying and enhancing the pictures. It was just a rock with propulsion tubes. And sensor arrays. But here was something.
Tor put his finger on a dot. It was between a couple of low ridges. They went to maximum mag, and Alyx said she thought it looked like a radio antenna.
“I think,” Hutch said, “it’s a hatch.”
THEY CONTINUED TO acquire data on the chindi. The Memphis, which measured sixty-two meters stem to stern would have been barely visible alongside it, less than 1 percent of its length.
Bill took pictures, and they spent hours going over them while the Memphis repeated George’s greeting endlessly. They found other hatches, in sizes varying from about two meters across up to twenty or more, all the same color as the surrounding rock.
“Hutch.” Bill’s voice dropped into its lower ranges. His concerned ranges. “There’s been a launch. Something has left the ship and gone into orbit.”
“On-screen.” It was a bottle-shaped object, neck thrust forward. Its hull was smooth.
“It’s a different design from the objects we saw earlier.”
She could make out exhaust tubes. “How big is it?”
“Almost as long as our lander. Maybe a couple of meters shorter. Three meters diameter at its widest.”
“Okay, Bill,” she said. “Let me know if anything changes.”
Later, he was back with more: “Hutch, I believe I can see how they’re creating the Slurpy.”
Physics and meteorology weren’t her strong suits. Or anybody else’s in that group. But she knew that Bill had expectations. “Explain,” she said.
“A ship as massive as the chindi requires enormous amounts of fuel. If it attempted to use scoops of the type that we have, it would have to stay in orbit for years to collect enough hydrogen, or it would have to do an atmospheric entry and cruise around in the troposphere.
“To do that would require substantial design compromise to reduce friction, and it would waste substantial quantities of its newly acquired fuel getting back out of the gravity well.”
“So what’s the solution?”
Bill appeared in the opposite seat, wearing a soft white shirt open at the collar and dark green slacks. One leg was crossed over the other. “The solution is a percolator,” he said.
“A percolator.”
The Slurpy blinked on. They were looking at it from the side, watching the jet welling up from below, the storm bubbling like a volcano, an enormous explosive mushroom, rising above the clouds and spreading in all directions. A blinking line appeared in the jet, extending into the center of the storm. “That’s a tube,” said Bill. “As nearly as I can make out, it goes about three hundred kilometers down from the Slurpy.” Deep in the troposphere, the blinking line, the tube, metamorphosed into a kind of funnel, a tornado shape, except that it was reversed, widening as it reached down through the atmosphere. The tornado rose and sank in the high winds that blew it first one way and then another. But it held together. It was moving in the lower depths, keeping pace with the Slurpy.
“It’s traveling about 1400 kph,” said Bill.
“And this thing is making the storm?”
“I think so. What they seem to be doing is transferring gas from the troposphere out of the gravity well. The idea would be to create a reservoir of hydrogen out in orbit with which the ship can rendezvous.” Bill was clearly pleased with himself. “They do it by percolating the gas at the lower levels. And please don’t look so skeptical. The engineering would really be quite simple.
“One need only lower a flexible drone, constructed of, say, a lightweight plastic, down into the tropopause. At the equator, by the way. It has to be done at the equator.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“We put an efficient fusion reactor in the drone. About one hundred kilometers below the tropopause, temperatures are just under one hundred degrees Kelvin, the pressure is around one atmosphere, and the composition is primarily ammonia ice. The drone inflates into the big funnel that we see, narrow end up.”
“Wouldn’t it be heavy? What keeps it up?”
“Use light material, Hutch. And some balloons, if necessary. The reactor is turned on. It grabs and heats whatever’s near by. The whole assembly is bottom heavy, so it just bobs around the planet on 1400-kph winds. It has the same dynamic as a plastic fishing bob with one of those spring-loaded plungers at the top.”
A schematic appeared on-screen.
“The reactor is positioned inside the funnel, at the throat. As it heats the surrounding slurry, the ammonia ice and gas is propelled up the tube and expelled into space. And you have your snowstorm. Your refueling station.
“When the chindi’s tanks are full, the percolator is deflated, stowed, and, I assume, returned to the ship.”
They had all been listening. “It strikes me,” George said, “that it would be simpler to build a smaller ship. Something with less mass.”
“It would be simpler,” said Tor. “There must be a reason they want a big ship.”
THE CHINDI COMPLETED a second orbit and was making again for the Slurpy. The Memphis was trailing, letting the range open to a thousand kilometers. Bill was still directing George’s message of peace and greeting when George abruptly told her to shut it down. He seemed personally offended.
“Do it, Bill,” Hutch said. She was alone on the bridge.
“Okay, Hutch. And it looks as if we’re getting a second launch over there. Yes, there it goes.” He put it on-screen. “Another bottle. And the first one is lifting out of orbit.”
“Can you tell where it’s headed, Bill?”
“Negative. It’s still accelerating. Moving at seven gees and going up fast.”
“Not in this direction?”
“No. Not anywhere near us.”
“Okay,” she said. “George, we could use some fuel ourselves. We talked about going through the Slurpy before. I think this would be a good time.”
He nodded. “Maybe it’ll get their attention.”
“I doubt it.”
Tor and Nick both looked worried. “You really think,” asked Nick, “we can do that?”
“It shouldn’t be a problem. And it beats spending a few days skimming the upper atmosphere. No, we should be all right. They got through.”
“They’re a lot bigger than we are.”
“We’ll take it slow.”
But even Bill seemed doubtful. When she went up to the bridge and he could speak to her alone, he asked whether she was sure it was a good idea.
“Yes, Bill, it’s a good idea. Put out the scoops and retract everything except the sensors.”
“The chindi has just reentered the storm.”
“Okay.”
Her commlink blipped. It was Alyx, who was with the others in mission control. “The displays just went off,” she said.
“Alyx, that’s because we shut the imagers down for the passage through the Slurpy.”
“Is that necessary?” rumbled George.
“It’s a precaution.”
“Let’s take the chance. We’d like to see this.”
“Okay,” she said. “Visibility will probably be pretty restricted once we get into it.” Bill reactivated two of the imagers, one on either beam. She fed the pictures down to mission control and put them up on her own overhead.
“Thank you,” said Alyx.
“Welcome.” She directed her passengers to activate restraints. “Bill, what’s happening with the two bottles?”
“The first one continues on its original course, Hutch. It’s still accelerating. I cannot see any probable destination. The other has just lit its engine and appears to be about to leave orbit. In fact it is doing so now.”
“Where’s it going?”
“Apparently nowhere. It’s aimed in the general direction of Andromeda.”
She looked down on the roiling atmosphere and watched the Slurpy expand as they approached. The chindi was out of sight. The light from the distant sun and the two giants and the rings moved and shifted, providing an ominous cloudscape. It reminded her of the northern hill country on Quraqua, or the Canadian plains, where you could see heavy snow approaching for hours.
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