Jian hopped over to stand next to Rakunas as they both watched the doorway. After a moment, the amber glow faded away. Jian cranked up his suit’s floodlight and leaned in for a closer inspection.
Jian stole a glance at Rakunas even as the rest of the team clustered around them. He took a deep breath, then reached out a hand and placed it on the door. It was hard to tell through his thick, heavily-insulated glove, but the surface felt a little less solid than he’d expected, almost putty-like. He pressed down a little harder and the surface gave way entirely, almost as if he’d broken its surface tension. In an instant, his hand sank into the door all the way up to his wrist.
Rakunas said, his voice straining with panic even through the plant to match Jian’s own.
Jian’s heart pounded so hard he thought it might break his sternum. “Shit! Shit, shit, shit…” he said over and over. Was this a booby trap? Was he to be frozen in here forever? Digested like an unwary insect caught in a Venus flytrap? He checked his O2 and battery levels.
Three more hours of each. Well, at least he’d be long dead before any digesting occurred.
But then, the pressure on his fingers eased, then disappeared entirely. The relief traveled up his palms, wrists, and arms. Freed from the muck, his helmet’s floodlights bathed a new scene with their white light. One of Jian’s feet came loose from the wall, then the other. Off balance, he managed to catch himself before toppling over to the floor.
His plant link was still offline, but he was free. The space around him was little more than a tunnel with a small swelling in the middle. Circular supports built into the walls reminded Jian of a human windpipe. On a hunch, he cut off his helmet’s floodlights for a few seconds. Sure enough, as soon as his eyes were able to adjust, he saw the same dim amber glow coming from the ringed segments of the walls.
The tunnel was a good thirty or forty meters long, and angled further down into the crust before reaching what looked like a Y-junction. The inside surface of the tunnel itself looked like it had seen better days. Everywhere, flakes of paint or some other protective coating peeled free of the surface. Here and there, the ice outside had pressed in hard enough to dent the inner walls. Daggers of rock hard, razor-sharp ice pierced the walls themselves in several places.
Jian turned around to inspect the doorway that had just spit him out. His first guess had been right; it was an airlock after all, just not at all like those he was used to. It was better, in fact. For centuries, humans had used two pressure doors with a chamber in between to access space. The trouble was, you could never really pump all of the air out of the chamber between cycles, and even the very best pressure doors and seals, built to the very highest tolerances, still leaked air, even if incredibly slowly.
No solution to this had even been found. During its two-plus-century exodus from Earth, the Ark had lost nearly the equivalent of an entire habitat’s worth of atmosphere to these invisible thieves. This had been planned for ahead of time with air kept in storage tanks in the engineering module to replace the losses.
But with this… goo, the seal was perfect. Hardly a molecule or atom of atmosphere would be lost during the transition. Jian guessed the entire facility might be coated in a layer of it to preserve integrity against micrometeorite impacts or other unexpected visitors. He made a note to grab a sample of it before they left.
Much to Jian’s surprise, his suit’s pressure and atmospheric sensors beeped an alert and spit out a reading. There was an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere in here. It was only seventeen percent Earth sea level pressure and more than seventy degrees below zero, but both values slowly rose as he watched.
The facility was active. It had recognized his presence and prepared itself for use. The realization froze Jian in his tracks. There were really only two possibilities: either the facility was automated and still functional after hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, or someone else was already in here, perhaps still in here. He couldn’t decide which scenario was more unsettling, but at least whatever was in charge was working to make the environment more hospitable to their visitors, not less.
Still, Jian realized just how acutely alone he was. Well, if the airlock let him in, it stood to reason it would let him back out. He took a deep breath and put his palms flat against the doorway. As before, the surface responded, slowly at first, but then the wormlike tendrils laced their way up his arms more quickly. It probably needed to loosen up after sitting idle for so long. Jian could relate. Even a week away from the gym and he was stiff as a board.
The process felt faster the second time, although frankly the difference in perception could probably be chalked up to the fact his first trip through had been spent in paralyzing terror. It did feel slightly warmer this time, however. The pressure on his hands eased again and soon he stepped back out into the cavern. The “Loss of Signal” alert disappeared as his plant rejoined the local link.
Jian put his hands up.
Jian went to pinch the bridge of his nose, only to have his glove bounce off his helmet glass.
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Jian smirked, then stretched out his arms and fell backwards into the gooey embrace of the alien airlock.
His third trip through was definitely faster than the first two, and warmer. Once on the other side, Jian found Rakunas staring down the tunnel. Their plants linked up automatically.
Rakunas shrugged.
Jian checked his suit sensors. Pressure was up to twenty-one percent Earth sea level and the temperature had climbed another six degrees.
They reached the junction at the bottom of the tunnel, where it split into two smaller tunnels, each heading off at forty-five degree angles, like a windpipe heading to a pair of lungs, just reinforcing Jian’s original impression, which he vastly preferred over Rakunas’s.
He pointed a finger down each passageway.
Rakunas’s shoulders slacked.
Jian looked himself and Rakunas over.
Rakunas gestured towards the branching tunnels.
Jian regarded each tunnel with a critical eye, but it was no use. They were indistinguishable.
Rakunas held out a fist.
Jian was fairly certain that, based on his extensive officer candidate training, Rakunas was being an insubordinate little shit right now. But, everyone processes stress differently. So, he balled up a fist and started to shoot.
Jian’s paper suffocated Rakunas’s rock.
An alert dinged in Jian’s suit. The local atmosphere had stabilized at ninety-three percent Earth sea-level and twenty-two degrees. A perfect spring day on Gaia below. The nitrogen/oxygen ratio had also normalized to Gaia standards.
Jian smiled.
That was when the bugs swarmed out of the door like a Biblical plague.
That image was firmly burrowed in Jian’s mind as the swarm approached. For the second time in an hour, fear froze him solid. But as the revolting mass of creatures reached his feet, they ignored him and Rakunas entirely, flowing around them like water flowing around river rocks.
Instead, they busied themselves with the facility itself. Some tended to the peeling layers of paint, snipping them loose with pincers, then consuming the peel before regurgitating a fresh layer to replace what was lost. Jian looked back up the tunnel they’d come down. Other creatures lined up with tiny fissures, then liquefied themselves before hardening again, permanently sealing the breach. Still others concentrated over the largest dents and ice intrusions. They burned through the icy daggers with tiny lasers and let them fall to the floor, then assembled into a mass like a hammer and started pounding out the dent. Before long, the intrusion was driven back as the tunnel segment returned to its proper shape.
st a bit oversized for him. Curiosity getting the better of him, Jian reached down into the stream of bug drones and grabbed one by the thorax.
Jian smiled at it. “Hello,” he said aloud into his helmet, despite the fact it couldn’t hear him through the glass, and didn’t speak English even if it could. “You’re a cute little creepy-ass bug thing.” Jian blinked.
It blinked back. Or, more specifically, turned its three little green eyes off, then back on again.
Jian blinked again.
It blinked again.
Jian winked his left eye.
It winked its left eye.
Jian winked his right eye.
It winked its right eye.
Then, it winked its center eye.
“Ah…” Jian said.
The little drone turned off all its eyes and waved its pincers around in the air.
Jian turned to face Rakunas and pointed at the bug drone sitting on his palm.
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