“Land of the what?” Anastacia failed to grasp the reference.
Rob, about to explain the analogy to a long past TV show, decided to keep it simple. “I think what Dawson alludes to is that the original crew were a lot taller than we are.”
Anastacia ran one of her instruments along a section of the corridor’s walls as she answered absentmindedly, already immersed in studying the composition of the wall. “Ah yes, Commander, it would appear so.”
“Seeker, this is Stone, we’ve tripped an automatic system. The outer door has sealed and the inner has opened. We’ve lights illuminating the corridors ahead of us.” Rob waited for Heinz’s acknowledgement; none came. “Anastacia?”
“Nothing, Commander. I got your initial transmission, but nothing from Seeker. Maybe there is something in the composition of the hull blocking the signal.”
“Ditto here, Commander. Not a squeak from Seeker,” confirmed Dawson.
A frown creased Rob’s forehead as he considered his options. Venture on without radio comms to the Seeker, or stay in the airlock and try to get the outer door open. If this ship’s designers were like human designers, Rob knew there was not a chance in hell of opening the outer and inner doors at the same time, as the risk of violent decompression was too great. Rob was in no doubt Anastacia would find a workaround, given time, but with the ship’s systems coming back to life the question was, did he have the time? Decision made.
“Dawson, you take point. Anastacia, let’s see if your sensors can map out the ship’s interior. Anything similar to a bridge gets priority.”
Dawson stepped over the threshold and into the corridor, his percussion rifle sweeping back and forth in front of him. Rob followed a step behind, his eyes roaming the walls, ceiling and roof, taking in the design and construction, searching for anything which sparked recognition from the mass of information each of them had committed to memory during training from the Sphere ship’s vast, incomplete data base.
“I’ve got something, Commander.” Rob moved to peer over Anastacia’s shoulder at the small glowing display which rapidly filled with details of the ship.
“Whatever was blocking our sensors from the outside doesn’t seem to be interfering with them now. There are multiple decks, at least twenty, and several large areas which my sensors can’t penetrate. One especially large area is located at the center of the ship. Looks like they are heavily shielded.”
“Best guess as to what they contain?”
“Power sources, maybe shielded to protect the crew from radiation.”
Dawson halted his steady advance down the corridor as he listened to the exchange between Anastacia and Rob; however, at the mention of the crew his neck hair rose. Without pausing in his scanning of the corridor ahead, he spoke into his mike. “Talking of the crew, has anyone else noticed there’s no sign of them anywhere? This place is like the Marie Celeste.”
“Maybe the ship is fully automated and there never was a crew.”
“Then why all the shielding, Anastacia? Seems to be a waste of money and resources to add all that weight if you don’t need it.”
Rob frowned. The point Dawson raised was a good one and hard to deny. His musings were curtailed as Anastacia’s gloved fingers expanded a point on the display. A single room, sitting among a cluster of the shielded areas, with more thin dark lines stretching out and linking to them. The image of a spider’s web came unbidden to Rob’s mind. Now it was Rob’s turn to feel uneasy. “Superimpose the powered-up areas, will you, Anastacia?”
A few quick taps on the control pad and a highlighted straight line led directly from the team’s position to the room Anastacia indicated.
“Enter my parlor, said the spider to the fly,” Rob mumbled, and Anastacia gave him a quizzical look. “I guess, Anastacia, we’ve received an invitation.”
“It would be rude not to accept, Commander.”
“True. Anastacia, push the route to Dawson. Let’s go meet the spider.”
4
Their journey through deserted well-lit corridors only heightened Rob’s sense that they were being guided to this destination. They passed through various corridor intersections, but the interconnected corridors remained shrouded in darkness as they passed. Whomever, or whatever, controlled the corridor lighting illuminated only the ones on their route. There is definitely an intelligence at work, not some random machine, thought Rob.
After perhaps fifteen minutes of walking in near silence, except for the occasional grunt from Dawson as he mumbled some new profanity in another language Rob and Anastacia failed to recognize, Anastacia signaled for them to halt.
“The trail ends just ahead, Commander. After that it’s one of the dead zones.”
“Great choice of words.”
Rob ignored Dawson as he stole a look at Anastacia’s display. Sure enough, the trail they followed came to a halt around the next bend in the corridor. Whomever or whatever had led them this far waited a scant few meters ahead. Rob steeled himself and before Dawson could stop him, he stepped around the bend, slap bang into a floor-to-ceiling bulkhead.
Dawson swore under his breath, then quickly followed and drew level with his commander. “Don’t do that again, Commander, you know the rules.”
Rob opened his mouth to remind him who was in command when, without warning, the bulkhead door which was completely blocking their path slid upwards, before seamlessly disappearing into the corridor’s roof.
Rob took a step forward, but ran straight into the unmoving Dawson who held his gaze with a steely look of his own. Silent argument lost, Rob gave a begrudging shrug of his shoulders and Dawson moved alone into the room beyond.
Rob and Anastacia edged as close to the bulkhead as they dared.
As Rob’s eyes scanned the room beyond, he noted it consisted of six sides, including the one the bulkhead formed part of. Laid out in three distinct levels of flooring like a Roman terrace, the levels closest to the outer edges of the hexagonal room were higher than those near the center. Spread around the uppermost level, protruding from each wall of the hexagon, was a crescent-shaped, brilliant white shelf, completely smooth with no obvious switches or controls. In the center of each crescent was a larger-than-life chair which only reinforced to Rob that whoever the builders of this ship were, they were at least half as large again as the average human.
On the second, middle level stood a single chair nearest the edge of the hexagon closest to the bulkhead entrance, where he and Anastacia hovered as Dawson prowled along the upper level.
As Dawson reached the furthest extent of the room, Rob’s gaze dropped to the middle level and he noticed something odd: where the crescent-shaped booths around the outer upper level all faced the exterior walls, the two at the far end of the mid-level were reversed and faced in towards the center of the room. A subtle, almost liquid rippling of the floor at the center of this lowest level mesmerized Rob.
Anastacia had her head bowed as she busily scanned her equipment, ensuring everything recorded properly. One readout caught her eye. Her equipment was detecting a new energy reading which it could not identify. Opening her mouth to alert Rob to her findings, she quickly closed it when she caught the look of wonder on his face. Following his line of sight, she felt the breath catch in her chest as, like some will-o’-the-wisp, a thin tendril of inky black floor in the exact center of the room extruded itself and rose close to a meter, before ballooning out to form a perfect sphere about a half a meter in diameter. The sphere began to rotate. A gentle, almost undetectable yellow glow emanated from the sphere and Anastacia felt an inexplicable need to touch it. A need to touch its warmth. A need to feel its comforting embrace.
***
“I can’t make head or tail of these surfaces, Commander, perhaps Anastacia should try her witchcraft on them.” Dawson stood with his back to the bulkhead and head bent as he ran his gloved hand over one of the seemingly smooth crescent surfaces. He waited for the Russian’s snappy reply, but it didn’t come. Straig
htening, Dawson turned, saying, “Hey, are you ignoring me now? Don’t you think that’s a bit childish, I was only…” His voice stuttered to a halt, as his eyes fixed on the apparition a scant few meters from him.
A solid dark ball, rotating in mid-air and quickly encapsulated in a fine yellow, almost gold, mist, had appeared from God knows where, and to his horror, his two comrades were walking toward it, arms outstretched as if sleepwalking.
“Hey! What are you doing!” Dawson screamed as he launched himself across the room with arms spread wide, like a football player looking to sack the quarterback. He dodged the slowly rotating sphere and scooped the commander in one arm, pivoting right, his muscles protesting as he reached for Anastacia before her outstretched arm touched the yellow, mist-shrouded sphere. Dawson’s fingers wrapped around her suited arm and pulled roughly. His actions spun her entire body and, unintentionally, forced Anastacia’s other arm directly into the path of the glowing sphere.
“Shit!” Dawson watched helplessly as yellow mist flowed down her arm and flooded over her entire body, covering her like a luminescent death shroud. Dawson released his grip before the bubbling, rolling mist connected with his own hand.
“Anastacia!” Dawson tried in vain to invoke a response from her, but the Russian remained eerily silent. In slow motion her knees bent and she sank to the floor like a rag doll. Dawson peered through Anastacia’s yellow-tinged face plate; her expression was bizarrely peaceful, as if she was a sleeping child.
A sudden increase in the weight on his right arm caused Dawson to tear his eyes from Anastacia’s and back to the commander, who hung limply in Dawson’s free hand. To his horror, a yellow wave rapidly swallowed the commander’s leg. Dawson’s eyes snapped to the floor and there, snaking along the ground where it contacted the commander’s boot, flowed a thin tendril of pulsing yellow, stretching out to the glowing sphere.
Dawson dragged the Commander toward the exit; however, the yellow mist stubbornly continued to work its way up the stricken man’s leg, spreading and thickening despite the increasing distance from the central globe. As the all-encompassing mist reached the commander’s chest, Dawson realized he could not prevent the inevitable and reluctantly released the man he was duty bound to protect. With a backward glance at the prone Anastacia, Dawson turned for the exit, only to see the thick, impenetrable bulkhead sealed tightly shut.
“Fuck, this day is going from bad to worse!” Heart racing, Dawson searched the walls, roof and floor for another escape route but none were obvious to him.
The soldier’s eyes fell once more to his companions, where fine, yellow lines glistened between them and the spinning globe, forming a thin, though ever thickening web throughout the room. Dawson knew it wouldn’t be long before the mist engulfed him too. While awaiting his fate, Dawson regarded the yellow globe now hanging like a star surrounded by its own miniature solar system, a pulsating yellow star. A pulsating yellow star? His mind raced. Forget the small scale, by the time the Sphere ship reached lunar orbit its memory banks had been badly damaged--could this be the thing which caused the Sphere ship so much damage? The destroyer of worlds?
Almost absentmindedly, Dawson took his slung percussion rifle, raised it smoothly to his shoulder and aimed at the yellow globe. With the gentlest touch Dawson’s finger stroked the trigger. Once, twice, three times. The micro fusion pack responded by converting the solid beryllium shot into expanding plasma. The magnetic rails initially contained the plasma before accelerating it and spitting them from the rifle’s barrel at speeds which defied the human eye. The bright blue plasma reached out, only to halt, congeal and hover a bare centimeter from the globe. The yellow mist flowed around the super-heated plasma, and the mist darkened to a deeper beige before dissipating, taking with it all trace of the plasma.
Dawson did not have time to wonder at the plasma disappearing act as he spun on his heel and leveled the weapon at the thick bulkhead. His finger tightened on the trigger once more, ready to make his exit. With the speed of a striking snake, a yellow tendril struck the weapon mid-way between the barrel and the power pack, slicing the weapon neatly in half. A second tendril curled around Dawson’s waist, spinning him until he faced the center of the room. In front of him the pulsing globe grew yet more tendrils, ten or more yellow lines shot toward him and impacted his suit. The lines merged, flattening and spreading until they became one. Dawson’s view of the world turned yellow. Dread filled him as he closed his eyes. “This is it.” Dawson reached for the dead man’s switch that would trigger the fusion weapon strapped to his back.
***
Contentment had replaced panic in Anastacia, when her puppet-like body first touched the yellow light and the wonderful warmth enveloped her. A sensation Anastacia remembered from those long-ago days, before the revolution, when her father held her in his arms at night as she slipped off to sleep. The permeating warmth changed subtly, sadness welled from memories held deep within, memories which did not belong to Anastacia.
Visions of fleeting azure clouds against an ocher sky. Massive constructs bustled with people, floating among the clouds as far as the eye could see. A father held his child with love and tenderness.
Shivers ran down Anastacia’s spine as excitement filled her. A new star discovered. A star which traveled alone through the endless dark night of space.
Like a newsreel, the visions flickered from scene to scene. People, scientists, launch a manned probe. The flickering slows, allowing Anastacia to see this day as it is beamed across the world, the pictures are clear and live. She hears the reporters describing the world waiting with bated breath, describing the scientific importance of the expedition as it is about to rendezvous with the star. The crew are professional in their staccato radio transmissions. Their commander calls out her procedures as they get closer to the star, then she falters. She suddenly becomes agitated, confused. The reporters pause and try to explain the strange behavior away. But the agitation rapidly worsens and the commander inexplicably attacks her crew. They try to subdue her, with little effect; in a short space of time the crew realize the agitation is infectious, as one by one they succumb to the rage. The crew scatter throughout their ship and the uninfected try to protect themselves.
The cameras keep rolling; they switch their focus from the madness of the crew to the horror on the faces of the people on the ground watching. The infected crew fashion weapons and hunt each other down. In the end, only one crew member is left and in his final act of madness, he blows the emergency hatches and exposes his unprotected body to the cold, airless expanse of space. The newsreel ends, but a new vision emerges.
Anastacia sees the star, no, not a star, it’s a living, evil thing; a word she does not recognize comes to her. Vaka! And somehow she knows it means death. The Vaka was the cause of the damage to the Sphere ship and involuntarily fear spreads through her. The vision clearly depicts Vaka heading directly for a planet, the home of these people. They know it is coming and have years to prepare, but Vaka has made its intentions clear, to ravage their world and take all that is precious from them.
Anastacia watches as a helpless bystander. Time is short so the people work feverishly, day and night. Weapons of destructive power are designed, built, launched, and they fail. Vaka closes in remorselessly. Until, at last, it reaches the orbit of the outermost world.
The flickering newsreel begins again. Pictures of the elderly and infirmed committing violent acts, taking their own lives in the most bizarre and painful ways. The effects spread throughout society, leaving no one unaffected. The violent images make way for scenes of scientists, theorists, even conspiracy theorists, anyone without the rage, attempting to save their world. Then reports of Psychotronics emerge. TV newsreaders and reporters discuss the notions of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis coming together in a new principle of nature. Psychotronics. The ability to amass mental energy and release it mechanically or electromagnetically. To control objects or minds at immense distances. Vaka fed on th
e pain and suffering of others.
Vaka was now so close that with every pulse of its discolored yellow surface, it sent millions of kilometer-long bursts of psychotronic energy to lash the world’s surface. Anastacia saw the tectonic plates shudder, sending tidal waves crashing against shores, she saw the volcanoes erupt and fill the sky with suffocating ash, changing day to night in an instant.
Then the pictures change: she is onboard a ship, the transmissions make it clear they are the last hope—the ship and her crew. They punch through the nightmarish skies, but Vaka senses their approach. It strikes with a thick arm of deep, glowing, pulsating yellow which envelopes the ship. The effect is instantaneous. Rage filled madness.
Anastacia finds herself stranded in the heart of her ship, alone. She activates one of the experimental machines, a psychotronic generator. A bubble of localized interference surrounds her and the compartment, protecting her from the madness.
For countless hours, she shelters there, trying to block out the screams of her friends until, once more, silence fills the ship. Even then she refuses to emerge from her hiding place. Unable to access any of the ship’s exterior sensors, she is unaware of the fate of her world. One day stretches into two, which become three. Without food or water, she knows her options are bleak. Leave the safety of the psychotronic generators and suffer the fate of her friends, or stay in this little bubble of psychotronic energy and die of thirst.
Desperately, Anastacia searches for an alternative. Her eyes fall on the dark object in the corner of her sanctuary. The device enables an individual to upload part of their mind to the ship’s artificial intelligence and use the ship’s systems to generate the same type of psychotronic energy, albeit in a much weaker form, as Vaka.
She knows this is the only way to survive.
If she uploads her whole being, she could survive as long as there is power and, by tapping the weapon she carries, the trickle of power she needs to keep the AI alive would last forever.
Explorations- First Contact Page 20